


whatever we had locked up now is free

by onetiredboy



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bonding, Family Dynamics, Hurt/Comfort, It's A Quarantine Fic Baby, Jays NaNoWriMo Fic Dump Part 1, Multi, and, but mostly - Freeform, fluff sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:21:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 23,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27916684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onetiredboy/pseuds/onetiredboy
Summary: In April of 2020 Jay made a tweet about writing an AU where Vespa and Juno are stuck in quarantine together, to celebrate the fact that he hadn't left the house in exactly 2 months.Then he didn't actually write it until November 2020.AKA: “Weevil Mumps are highly contagious, and symptoms can take up to three weeks to show,” the official explains, grimacing. “I understand this is highly unfortunate, and we are willing to fully refund any connecting flights you may have had, but Solar pandemic control laws mean we can’t take any risks.”Vespa curses under her breath.Juno looks between her and the official, “I—you—I can’t believe this. So what happens now?”“We’re waiting on official advice. But standard protocol in these kinds of situations tends to mean enforced quarantine until the incubation period has passed.”“You just said that was three weeks!”
Relationships: Buddy Aurinko & Jet Sikuliaq, Buddy Aurinko & Peter Nureyev, Buddy Aurinko/Vespa Ilkay, Peter Nureyev & Rita, Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel, Vespa Ilkay & Juno Steel
Comments: 144
Kudos: 192





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> HRGHDSF so for those of you who don't follow me on twitter, in NaNoWriMo this month i decided to blast out 100,000 words of TPP fic. here begins the process of slowly editing it all and releasing it, starting with my quarantine AU!
> 
> to be real, i'm sort of nervous about posting this. i put a lot into these fics, and i hope they live up to the work i put into them.  
> so with that being said, if you enjoy this fic... please let me know! :P
> 
> I WANT TO SEND ALL OF MY LOVE TO DANNY GOINGHOST AND LEXICALS DOOINEY_OIE FOR BEING THE BEST BETA READERS I COULD'VE ASKED FOR! thank u guys....
> 
> CH1 CWS: pretty sure none apply to this chapter!

“Ladies?”

The voice that rings out across the sparse linoleum floor of the spaceport is unmistakably directed at them. Juno glances at Vespa, who tightens her arm where it’s locked around his.

“Keep. Walking,” Vespa instructs through gritted teeth. Her eyes stay ahead towards the baggage claim.

They’ve done perfect so far. This was a much more minor heist compared to any others, a collection of smuggled fuel cells at a much cheaper price than was legal. All it required was a simple daytrip for Vespa and Juno down from the Aviva station to the surface of Tavis, a meeting in a discreet location with a contact of Buddy’s, a minor knife-fight, and then a flight back to the station to be retrieved by the rest of the crew. They made it through customs – all that was left was to get out of the shuttle-bay and back into the galactic truck-stop area the ‘Blanche was parked at.

“Excuse me, ladies?” 

“Don’t you think we should—?” Juno cuts himself off at the look Vespa gives him. “Alright. Fine.”

Rapid footsteps squeak on the floor behind them. Juno tenses, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Vespa twitch her spare hand towards the thigh holster just hidden by the length of her coat. 

An official runs around to block them off from walking any further. The look on her face isn’t aggressive as much as it is… almost apologetic. She has both her hands up and a long black plait thrown over one shoulder that looks as thick as her neatly trimmed beard.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “We’ve caught a confirmed case of Plutonian Weevil Mumps from your shuttle at the screening gates. We’re going to have to ask everybody who was onboard to stay in this area while we get in contact with Tavis health officials.”

Juno blinks, “But we’re not sick.”

“You’ve been exposed, unfortunately. Weevil Mumps are highly contagious, and symptoms can take up to three weeks to show,” the official explains, grimacing. “I understand this is highly unfortunate, and we are willing to fully refund any connecting flights you may have had, but Solar pandemic control laws mean we can’t take any risks.”

Vespa curses under her breath. 

Juno looks between her and the official, “I—you—I can’t believe this. So what happens now?” 

The official’s grimace deepens, “We’re waiting on official advice. But standard protocol in these kinds of situations tends to mean enforced quarantine until the incubation period has passed.”

“You just said that was three weeks!”

“Can it, Steel,” Vespa mumbles, “No point in fighting it.” 

“Are you serious?” Juno hisses back, “What about—”

“I’m a doctor, you halfwit. I know how this shit works. We’re not getting out of this. We’ll contact the others and let them know,” Vespa fumbles in her coat pocket for her comms without taking her eyes off the official, who is visibly relieved. 

“I’m glad you understand,” she says. “I’ll walk with you back to the gates.”

They get halfway back to the lounge area just outside the gates when the announcement comes over the PA: All flights to Tavis are cancelled until further notice; those inside this area of the spaceport will be prevented from leaving until the ‘threat is assessed’. 

“They don’t take this shit lightly,” Vespa murmurs to him as she types rapidly on her comms, “Getting out of this would be like getting out of jail, not to mention the search they’d put out for us if we escaped. It’d cause a lot more than three weeks worth of trouble.” 

“Does this kind of thing… happen often?” Juno asks.

“All the time,” Vespa puts her comms back away and sighs. “Fuck.” 

Juno finds he echoes her sentiments. They spend a few restless hours in the lounge – Juno spends twenty creds on spaceport food and spends twenty minutes picking at it before he gets desperate enough to eat it. There are some others, about thirty or so – all milling around with the same mix of agitation and apathy towards their situation. 

They get a comms call from the Blanche a little ways in. Vespa’s scarred face goes tight around the edges as the captain speaks – it’s clear she doesn’t want to hear from Captain Aurinko right now; she wants Buddy. Juno can’t blame her. A part of him wishes Peter would hop on the call.

Buddy only breaks character towards the end. With an exasperated sigh, she says, “Love, I’m worried. Are you sure you can handle—?” and that’s all Juno hears before Vespa switches off the loudspeaker and presses the comms close to her ear, turning her head away so Juno can’t see her fall apart.

Juno decides it’s a good time to wander around the lounge and get some answers. 

He finds an officer in a face mask and protective gear who looks like his day hasn’t been ruined enough, and does what he does best – is a pain in the ass. 

“So,” Juno shoves his hands in his pockets, “What kind of quarantine facilities does a place like Aviva afford? I’ve got a feeling I won’t be sending many postcards over the next three weeks.” 

The guard readjusts his mask slightly, and won’t meet Juno’s eyes, “Each isolation bay has facilities for two people. There are two single beds and a bathroom. Item orders can be placed from within the room and delivered within the hour.” 

“Room service and everything, huh?” Juno sighs. “Great. Maybe I’ll send a postcard or two after all.” 

The guard looks like just the sight of Juno’s face makes him want to chug a bottle of hand sanitiser, which isn’t as unfamiliar of a look as it probably should be, even if usually it’s less hand sanitiser and more an entire bottle of something caustic, so Juno leaves him alone. 

He wanders around the lounge some more, gets looked at weirdly by three different couples he attempts to engage in conversation with, and then makes his way back around to Vespa. 

“Real friendly atmosphere they’ve got around here,” he says by way of greeting. “If I keep trying I might get a pity smile sometime soon.”

Vespa doesn’t give him a pity smile. She looks at him with red eyes and the corners of her mouth turned down in what looks like the world’s tightest sad face. She’s obviously just been crying. 

Juno knows they’re not on good enough terms for him to mention any of that. He sits down on the couch and taps a rhythm into his knees with his thumbs. Neither of them says another word.

The awkward silence doesn’t last for much longer, though, because an important-looking person comes down in a full goddamn hazmat suit, and announces, with all the vim and vigour of a mayor at a museum opening, that the isolation bays are ready.

Juno looks up at Vespa, still standing by the lounge looking like a caged animal, and gives her a roll of the eye, “Hooray.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: sexual references

Whatever Juno was expecting, this is worse.

The room is literally what the guard said. One room. A panel by the door that looks like it takes orders to the room. Two beds – skinny. Short. Grey blankets. Less than four feet apart. A panel on the far wall that looks to be a sort of announcement board slash screen for playing short looped videos of oceans and flower-filled fields. There’s a small door which opens to a sink, toilet, and shower. That’s the entire thing.

Vespa throws her backpack onto the nearest bed and growls, “Fantastic. Three weeks with you like this.”

“Yeah, I’m not exactly thrilled about it either,” Juno mutters. He sighs, and sits down on the bed. It squeaks.

Vespa glares at him, “You don’t snore, do you?” 

“I dunno! Do you?”

“If I do, that’s your problem to deal with,” Vespa snarls, and sits down on the bed. “This is gonna turn out just fine, I’m sure.”

“Yeah, the concern is mutual,” Juno snarks back at her. When he lies down on the bed, he’s close enough to the announcement board panel thing on the wall that he can hear the hum of its LEDs. Pretty sure being that close to something means you’re definitely getting radiation damage from it, but it’s that or push his bed closer to Vespa’s, and he’d rather  _ not _ increase his chances of being stabbed. 

So instead, he sets his things down and decides to putter around the room, see if there’s anything useful he can find — some hidden door into a huge second room the two of them can use, or something. 

The bathroom isn’t much better on second inspection than it was on its first. The mirror above the sink turns out to be a cupboard door, and Juno opens it to find two bars of soap, two toothbrushes and toothpastes, a few generic tubes of shampoo/conditioner/body wash, and two silk caps.

“Huh,” he says, and shuts the cupboard door again. “Well, they’ve done what they can to be hospitable, I guess.”

Vespa snorts, “Yeah, I’m sure we’ll be leaving rave reviews by the time we’re done.”

“At least we have a comms signal,” Juno lies on his belly on the bed again and taps at the comms screen. After a moment, it starts to beep.

“Who are you calling?” Vespa asks, and Juno doesn’t answer her — the question is answered of its own accord soon enough when the call suddenly connects.

“Mista Steel!” Rita screeches, “Oh my God, are you sick and dyin’? I know you are! It’s alright, boss, don’t you worry, I’ve been preparing for this moment ever since we first met — cause really it ain’t like you’ve always taken the most care of yourself — and I’ve got your will all sorted out. Most of it goes to me, of course, and enough creds to Mista Ransom so he stops bein’ all mopey about money all the time, and the rest to that widdle Save the Rabbits charity on Mars you always used to wire payments to behind my back  _ as if I wouldn’t notice!  _ But it’s alright, Mista Steel, I’ve always been very good at pretending I don’t know you’re secretly a big ol’ softie—“

“Rita,” Juno sighs.

“—and I’ll make sure to adopt a rabbit in your name, Boss. We’ll—that’s me and Jet and Mista Ransom and Miss Buddy and Miss Vespa if she survives,  _ wait _ is she sick too? I forget where I was going with thi—OOH! The rabbit!  _ Well _ —”

“Rita,” Juno says, harsher, “I’m not dying.”

“What?!” Rita shouts, “Why didn’t you lead with that, Mista Steel?! Here I was all worried about you!”

“Yeah, you sure sounded worried.”

“Just cause I have a funny way of showing it ain’t mean I’m not real concerned about you, boss. You and Miss Vespa better keep real safe, alright?” 

“We will,” Juno promises, “But we will do a lot better if there’s any chance you can send across some of your favourite streams.  _ Good ones _ , please.” 

“Oh. My. God. Mista Steel! Are you asking me to send you pirated copies of streams?!”

“They don’t have to be about pirates—”

“How am I gonna CHOOSE?!” Rita shrieks, “Okay. Okay, okay, okay, I promise I’ll keep the list to my top ten. Hundred. Okay I love you Mista Steel this is the best thing you’ve ever asked me to do maybe ever I love you byeeeeeeeeee!”

“Yeah, I—”

The comms beeps with the dial tone before Juno has a chance to say anything else to her. Juno sighs and rolls onto his back, “I guess we’re covered for entertainment. She might just send over a heap of junk, though. I really don’t know.”

“I don’t want to watch any stupid streams,” Vespa says, and Juno glances over at her. She’s sitting cross-legged on the bed, looking as venomous as a cat that’s just been soaked in a bucket of cold water. Juno can’t say he blames her. 

He may be keeping his concerns on the downlow for now, but Juno’s not actually feeling fantastic at the idea of spending three weeks locked up in a little room with not much to keep his mind occupied. He knows what he can get like in bad situations. It all goes to his head and before he knows it he’s three days deep in a depression coma. 

The idea is frightening, actually. A lot. He’s been making a lot of progress recently, but he knows better than anyone how fragile that progress is. All it takes is one bad day — one bad three weeks — and the next thing he knows he could be back where he started. Back…

He doesn’t want to think about where he could end up back at. He gets off the bed again and walks across to the little panel near the door. It looks like the sort of thing you order meals on when you go to fast food restaurants, and when Juno clicks on the screen and it lights up he sees it basically is.

There are four categories: hygiene, leisure, food, and children.

“Hey Vespa,” he says, “You can order babies on this thing.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” she says back to him flatly.

“It was a—never mind,” Juno mumbles, and opens each of the categories in turn. They’re basically what you would expect — sanitary products, condoms, wipes and et cetera in the hygiene section; rental streams, books, board games and puzzles in leisure; bags of assorted chips, pretzels, and other snacks in food; and nappies, children’s toys, and dummies in children.

Juno circles the room another four times. He opens the bottom drawer and finds a copy of  _ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,  _ which is some ancient Earth relic a certain cult of fanatics are known for travelling around the universe and disposing of in hotel rooms. 

“Never read this,” he turns it around in his hands.

“You are  _ not  _ getting desperate enough to read that,” Vespa says, “It probably hasn’t even been translated out of old English.” 

“Eugh,” Juno says, and puts it back in the drawer without even checking. 

Bored again, Juno has nothing else to do but continue to pace. He does so until Vespa snaps at him about making her feel dizzy, and then he sits back down on the bed. 

“I’m calling Ransom,” Juno says.

“Oh, barf,” Vespa says. “If you need me, I’ll be in the bathroom.” 

“Are you kidding me?” Juno asks, but Vespa’s already gone, closing the door behind her.

“Real mature,” he calls to the closed door, but there’s no answer, so he picks up his comms and sighs, before dialling Nureyev’s number.

It only rings a few times before it picks up, and Nureyev’s voice floods through.

“Oh love, I’m so glad you called. I’ve been wondering whether or not I should do it myself. Are you alright, dear?”

Juno sighs. He props the comms up on the pillow and presses the button to flip on his camera. He sees the reflection of his own eyepatch and curls in the screen before Nureyev’s camera flips on too — and there he is.

Beautiful. Always gorgeous, is Peter Nureyev. Maybe it’s just some cruel trick of fate, but somehow he looks even more beautiful now that Juno won’t be able to touch him, kiss him, hold him, for three whole weeks. They haven’t been apart from each other that long since they made up with each other almost a year ago, and Juno’s heart aches.

He’s in dark eyeliner and the corners of his pretty red-painted lips are turned down in a concerned frown. More than anything, Juno wants to lean through the screen and kiss the worry from his lips and tell him that he’s fine, and everything will be okay.

But there’s basically only one person that Juno has acclimatised to being completely open to, and that’s the man that owns all of his heart. So he sighs at the image of perfect Peter Nureyev and says, “I guess. I don’t know.” 

Nureyev makes a small noise of concern in the back of his throat. It looks like Juno’s not the only one wishing he could open the screen on his comms like a window and slip through to the other side.

“I’m terribly worried about you, darling,” Nureyev says, and Juno watches as he sits down on their bed back on the Carte Blanche, holding the comms out in front of him. “I hope you know you can call me anytime. Even if you just need somebody to talk to about silly things.”

Juno smiles with a corner of his mouth and feels the rush of warmth that floods his chest and stomach at the acknowledgment of how gorgeous his boyfriend is. “You’re really sweet, baby,” he says. 

“I mean it. I’ve already taken my comms off silent. It’ll wake me up if you call me, no matter what time it is,” Nureyev says. 

“I promise I’ll call if I need it,” Juno says. “And how about you? Are you gonna be okay?”

“Me?” Nureyev seems startled at the very idea of it. “Of course I’ll be fine, love.”

“Yeah,” Juno says sarcastically. “Well… you just make sure you  _ talk  _ to me when that stops being true, okay? I know it’s hard for you to reach out, but I really, really don’t want to come back and find out you’ve been having a rough time without letting me know, okay?”

He can see the hesitation written into every inch of Nureyev’s expression. He worries at his lip, and then glances to his side and sighs.

“You’re right,” he says softly. “I’ll call you if I need it, my love. I promise.”

“Good boy, baby,” Juno says, and relishes in the way Nureyev startles, and then glares at him through the camera. 

“You can’t just pull that card on me,” he says, suddenly putting on the haughty offended voice he likes to pull. “Especially not if Vespa can hear you.”

“Nah, she’s in the bathroom,” Juno says. “Dunno how long it’ll be before she gets fed up with being in there and demands I get off this call, though.”

Something conflicted passes over Nureyev’s face again. “Do try to be kind to each other, will you?” he asks gently, “I know I’m hardly the poster boy for having good relations with our dear doctor, but having the two of you at each other's throats — possibly literally — the entire time will do nobody any good.”

“I know,” Juno mumbles. “I’m not gonna pick any fights. But I dunno if I’ll be able to help it if she starts it first. You know I can’t just let shit slide like that…”

“I do,” Nureyev says, with a voice that sounds half exasperated and half heart-meltingly fond. 

There’s a moment of silence.

“I”m…” Nureyev says softly, and then clears his throat, “Not sure how I will adjust to sleeping on my own again, after having someone so soft and warm to cuddle up to for so many months.”

Juno laughs breathily, “It’s only a few weeks, baby. You spent years before me doing just fine on your own.”

“Yes, and after I almost lost you only to have you return to me by some miracle of the cosmos, I vowed I would never let myself be alone again,” Nureyev says.

There’s silence again. Juno’s heart is thudding in his chest.

“I never want to let you be alone again either,” Juno says when he can speak again, his voice barely above a low murmur. “I want to make sure you’re with someone for the rest of your life, as long as I can help it.”

“Juno,” Nureyev sighs, and then they just get caught staring at each other in the camera.

Juno laughs again, “Fuck. You better quit being sappy before you make me tear up.”

Nureyev smiles, “Well, then, allow me to completely shatter the mood. I have to say I am also terribly disappointed that I’ll be without your lovely cock for a whole three weeks,” he says, and Juno bursts out laughing.

“Oh my God, Nureyev,” he giggles, and then very quickly falls silent, glancing over his shoulder towards the bathroom door — feeling the tension rolling off Nureyev even through the call.

“Sorry,” he whispers, “She couldn’t have heard.”

He sees Nureyev take a few seconds to fully relax anyway, and then his impish smile is back. “I suppose I’ll have to make do with my hand. I might send you some very special videos, if you ask nice enough.”

“Yeah, like I have the space in here to do anything with them,” Juno complains. 

“Oh, if there’s anything I know about you, my dear, it’s that you can be very creative when you put your mind to it,” Nureyev says with a wide grin, and Juno rolls his eye fondly.

Then the bathroom door thumps, making Juno jump, and Vespa’s voice rasps out, “You done flirting in there or what? I’m gonna go even crazier than I already am in here.” 

Juno sighs, “I guess that’s my cue to go,” he says. “I’m gonna miss you.”

“And I you. I’m sure I’ll spend my nights staring out at the constellation of spaceships huddled around the spaceport and think about you, dear.”

Juno snorts, “Not your most poetic line. But I’ll take it.”

He doesn’t want to be the one to hang up first. There’s another long, heavy silence while they look at each other, and then Nureyev sighs. 

“Alright. I’ll let you go. I’m going to miss you terribly. Make sure you at least text me every day, or I shan't forgive you.” 

Juno chuckles again, “Whatever you say.”

And with that, Nureyev smiles his soft smile, the one that always makes some inner part of Juno’s heart flutter. “I love you, dear,” he says.

Juno feels his tongue get twice as big in his mouth. He swallows, and clears his throat. “I, uh….” He starts, and then hesitates. “I’ll… make sure to message you.”

Nureyev blows him a kiss, and Juno pretends to catch it, and then the comms screen goes black. 

In the silence that follows, Juno presses the kiss he caught to his lips, and kisses his fingers shortly. What? Nobody can prove it happened. 

“You can come out now,” he calls back to Vespa, who almost immediately gives a good attempt at kicking down the goddamn bathroom door.

“Finally,” she grumbles, “I’m never doing that again. Hope you enjoyed your one allocated phone call with tall, sharp and dangerous.” 

“Oh, what, and so you’re just gonna go this whole time without calling Buddy, either?” Juno asks.

“Nope. Gonna force you into the bathroom whenever that happens,” Vespa says, and ignores Juno’s shout of protest. 

Soon they’re back to just sitting around on their respective beds, doing nothing. A message from Rita comes through a little way in with a file attached that is full to the bursting with her pirate streams, or whatever she called them. 

“What…” Juno mutters as he looks through the names, “I know some of these. These aren’t about pirates at all. What the hell, Rita?”

“I don’t want to know,” Vespa announces, and Juno glares at her.

The PA system crackles to life and announces that a pre-prepared lunch will be deposited to each quarantine room soon, adding that all patients’ dietary requirements have been taken automatically from their flight details. Vespa flinches, and glances up at the ceiling surreptitiously, as though trying to look for a speaker without making it obvious she is.

“I heard that too,” Juno says.

Vespa whips her head down to glare at him. “Obviously,” she hisses.

Juno opens his mouth to say something sarcastic that probably would’ve ended with him getting punched if not for the sudden sound of the slot opening in the door. Two plastic-packaged lunches fall through the slot onto the floor, and Vespa almost falls over herself to grab them, throwing one haphazardly across the room to Juno.

“I really hope this isn’t the same shit they serve in the spaceport,” Juno mumbles.

Vespa turns the package around in her hands, reading the ingredients list on the bottom, making a vaguely appeased grunt, and then pulling the packaging open, “It’ll be fine. Stop whining.”

There’s a plastic fork inside the packaging. Juno and Vespa each pull it out and poke at the food. As far as Juno can tell, it’s some form of meat substitute in cubes sitting on top of what looks to be… rehydrated lettuce. 

“This is probably going to make us sicker than whatever threat of a disease we’re quarantined to avoid anyway,” Juno points out.

“Shut up and don’t be ungrateful,” Vespa says, and shovels a forkful of food into her mouth. 

Juno sighs and follows her lead. He chews a few times before the flavour really hits his tongue, and then he stops. He and Vespa make eye contact, and then Vespa — with obvious difficulty — swallows.

“What the hell,” she says flatly. 

“I have literally eaten things Ransom cooks that taste better than this,” Juno says. “We can’t live off this for three weeks. Let’s order extra food from the panel thingy.”

“No,” Vespa growls. 

“Are you kidding me? Not even you could possibly pretend that was edible food, Vespa.”

“Maybe not,” she agrees. “But we can’t use ship money on luxuries, Steel. So this is what we have to cope with.”

“I will starve,” Juno says.

“Medically impossible,” Vespa counters.

“Oh yeah? Who made you a doctor?”

“My  _ degree _ , idiot.”

Juno glares at her. 

Vespa looks down at the meal in her hands and sighs. “It does taste worse than Ransom’s cooking, though, which is so terrible it’s almost impressive. Remember the time he made lasagna?”

“Don’t tell him I told you this,” Juno says, “but I figured out the reason it tasted so fucking weird.”

“How come?”

“He put  _ fish sauce  _ in.”

Vespa’s mouth drops open, and then she snorts. A harsh giggle shoots out of her, and clearly takes her by surprise as much as it does Juno, who can’t help but follow suit.

“I know, right?” 

“Jesus Christ. I knew he was bad, but that’s, like…”

“A whole new level? Yeah. I know.” 

“And you date this guy?” 

“What he lacks in the kitchen, he makes up for in other areas,” Juno says with a casual shrug.

“Gross.”

Juno laughs and takes another bite. And what do you know? It’s a little easier to force down the food with the warm buzz of laughter still fresh on his tongue. A little. 

“You know, this might not be so bad,” Juno says. “It’s just a few weeks. We have our beds, we have a bunch of streams… it’s kind of like a vacation, if you think about it.”

The look Vespa gives him makes him think she’s thought about it, and doesn’t quite find herself coming up with the same conclusion. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comment if u enjoyyyyed 🥺


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs: discussions of psychosis; single-line reference to disordered eating

“Alright, up you get!” 

“Whass goin’ on?” Juno feels his world tilting, and registers the hands that are shaking him awake. “What’s— where—Vespa?” 

Vespa lets go of him, and throws something onto the blankets near his legs, but even when his body is fully still, his mind is absolutely spinning. When he opens his eyes, he vaguely makes out the grey blur of walls that are too dark to be the Carte Blanche’s. He’s not on the Carte Blanche. He’s—

Juno remembers where he is and groans, “Fucking hell, Vespa. Couldn’t let me sleep in?”

“Breakfast is here, dumbass,” is the answer he gets.

“Yeah, and? The more I get to sleep through this thing, the less of it I have to experience awake.”

“Don’t be so whiny. We have to stay alert in case we get any word from the Carte Blanche.”

“Huh?” now Juno sits up, “What news could we get from the Blanche?” Then, trying to mask his hopefulness, he adds, “You don’t think they could try to… you know… break us out of here, do you?”

Vespa shifts her shoulders and sends a look his way that Juno isn’t sure what he did to deserve. “I dunno,” she says. 

“Alright. I get the feeling there’s something you’re not telling me, but alright.” 

Vespa glares at him and then sits down on the end of her bed, picking up her packaged breakfast. Juno picks up his own as well. It looks… marginally better than yesterday’s lunch did. By Juno’s guess, it’s rehydrated pancakes. The kind of bad food he’d eaten a lot of during the worst of his depressive slumps.

Well — that’s not true. During the  _ very  _ worst of his depressive slumps, he hadn’t even eaten that. But, this was the lowest tier of food right before he just couldn’t bother to eat anything anymore.

He’s right that it tastes better than lunch yesterday did, and he hopes that this streak of marginally edible food will keep up and they won’t go back to rehydrated slime cubes.

“So,” Juno says, “What’s the plan for today?’

“I don’t care what you have to do,” Vespa says, “As long as you keep it quiet and don’t get in my goddamn way.”

“Uh… in your way of what, Vespa?” Juno asks, and gets no answer. He sighs.

“Alright, well. I’m going to watch a movie. You are welcome to join me.”

“Thanks but no thanks. I know your taste in movies, Steel.”

“Oh my God. Can we  _ please  _ move on from the Bad Cop thing?  _ Please _ ? I get it was a bad movie, but you don’t have to act like it defines my exact taste in film. I can like good stuff too!”

“Name one other good film, Steel.”

“Okay, what about… Pirate Cops in Space?”

“You know, I take back everything I’ve ever said. You and Ransom are made for each other,” Vespa says.

“Fine. You don’t have to watch my stupid movie, okay? Just leave me alone about it, and have fun… sulking, or whatever the fuck it is that you have to do.”

Juno rolls onto his stomach and places his comms up on the pillows. He sets up the comms and starts to recite the instructions Rita gave him under his breath on how to get to his emails again and open up the file of videos that she sent him. He picks one out that looks kind of interesting, and presses play.

It starts with a long sweep of a nebula. 

“Steel,” Vespa says.

The peace and quiet is interrupted when a spaceship comes careening through the star space, alarms blaring at top volume. The scene cuts to its interior, where the crew are running around and panicking about the ship having gone out of control.

“ _ Steel _ ,” Vespa growls.

“Urrgh,” Juno pauses and glares at her, “Do you have a problem?”

“Uh, yeah actually. Can you turn the volume on that thing off?”

“Are you kidding me? It was barely loud.”

“Can you at  _ least _ wear earbuds or something? Please?”

“I don’t have any with me.”

“What kind of person doesn’t have earbuds on them?” Vespa asks.

“Well,  _ do you _ ?”

“That’s— that’s different! I can’t listen to things. I don’t have to talk about the earbuds if I don’t want to!”

Juno rolls his eyes and turns down the volume of his comms. Then he plays around with the stupid screen until he mostly by accident finds the closed captions and turns them on. 

He finishes the movie and starts another one. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Vespa starting to get fidgety. A few times she glances his way quickly, as though she’s seen him move, and then she looks away again when he glances over to see if she wants something. She gets off the bed and walks around the room, and sits back down again. Juno can see that her shoulders are starting to hunch up towards her ears, and he can tell it’s coming before it finally does.

“Steel,” Vespa snaps at him. “Private time.  _ Now _ .” 

Juno sighs. He hops off of the bed, and lets himself into the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

* * *

The tension immediately starts to unwind from the room when Steel has left it. Vespa spends the first five minutes finally fully exploring the room. She checks in the corner of every drawer, underneath both the beds — even through the bin despite the scraps from their latest shitty meals strewn through them like one horrible, slimy jungle. 

It’s only when she’s turned every corner of the room over that she finally settles the voice that has been growing in the back of her mind over the last few hours, the one telling her without a doubt that the room is bugged, that this entire thing is a setup planned by the Aviva spaceport. It could make sense — and those are the really dangerous paranoid beliefs, the ones that almost sound a little bit like her own thinking. If someone had given the Aviva spaceport the heads up — that slimy merchant they’d stolen the fuel cells off for example — that criminals were coming back to base, they could have pulled the pandemic excuse to keep everybody in one spot. They could have the rooms bugged, waiting for one of them to slip up and say something that incriminates them as being part of Buddy Aurinko’s crew. They could be coming to each room, a wanted poster on their comms in one hand and a blaster in the other, just  _ waiting  _ to see which door would open to reveal the criminals they’ve been told to look for.

It’s the dangerous kind of paranoid thought because it’s so close to being something she can believe in. It’s so  _ close  _ to making sense that it won’t take much for her brain to convince her it  _ does _ , and then she’s as good as gone to it.

She needs Buddy, and Buddy can’t be with her. So the next best thing is to lock Steel in the room alone and give Buddy a call. 

The comms only has to ring a few times before Buddy picks up.

“Oh darling,” Buddy says, and Vespa can hear the door back on the Blanche closing behind her, sealing her into her room so that the only people who can hear them are them, “I’ve been so worried about you. How are you coping, love? Alright?”

“I’m fine, Bud,” Vespa says with an awkward shrug of her shoulders, “As fine as I could be, I guess.” 

“Do you need us to extract you, love? Ransom and I have been covering our options and we think there might be a way we could get our Rita to shut down Aviva’s systems just for long enough that—”

“Save it, Bud,” Vespa says. “Like I said to Steel, breaking us outta here is just gonna cause more trouble than it’s worth. They’ll send people out looking for us. The last thing we need is another goddamn tail.”

It’s true. Even though Vespa has been thinking about finding a way to convince Buddy to come and rescue them both from the second they walked into this room, she has to be honest. There’s no way they’re getting out of here without causing system-wide panic — like she said to Juno, they don’t take disease control lightly. 

There’s something else, too. Like that if Vespa were to escape, she knew she’d be doing it because of some sort of danger to their lives, to themselves. If Buddy was to come and get them…

Vespa knows that Buddy knows the only real danger to Vespa here is herself, and she doesn’t want to prove Buddy right by asking her to come pick her up like some scared child. To put the whole crew in danger because Vespa Ilkay couldn’t fight off her paranoid thoughts for three weeks. 

“Alright, love,” Buddy says into the camera, “I believe you. I know you can get through this. You’re calm, and level-headed, and strong.”

Vespa is none of those things, but she doesn’t say it. She lets Buddy believe whatever she has to believe to make her feel better about Vespa being stuck here without her, and nods her head as if she believes it too. 

“I’m just going to keep taking it one day at a time. I’m going to get along with Steel, even if it almost kills me, and then I’m going to get back home to you and I’m gonna drag you to bed and not let you go for days, Bud. You prepared for that?”

Sometimes it helps her to talk out her goals where Buddy can hear them. It helps her break down the things that seem scary into small steps. Take it one day at a time — she can do that. Get along with Steel — a challenge, but not impossible. Drag Buddy into bed? Nobody needs to tell her twice. 

It’s never as easy as she makes it sound for herself, but it does the job to calm her down for the meanwhile. Three small, easy goals. 

Buddy smiles at her through the camera, “That sounds absolutely wonderful to me, love.”

Her makeup isn’t done today. Vespa loves it when she goes without makeup just as much as she loves it when she has a full face. Sure, Buddy’s skilled with a set of brushes and some palettes of different powders, but she’s also just so  _ beautiful  _ bare-faced. Vespa wants to press a kiss to the wide bridge of her pretty nose, and then trail her lips down to hers and pull her into a kiss. She wants to place kisses up Buddy’s jaw to her ear and tell her everything she thinks about her every time she looks at her. She wants to wrap her arms around Buddy’s soft middle and place her head on her chest and fall asleep.

“It sucks being away from you,” Vespa murmurs. Like that even begins to scratch the surface of it.

Buddy sighs into the camera. “I know, love. The time will pass before you know it. Rita tells me she sent some streams across for you and Juno to watch—”

“—I am not watching those dumb streams,” Vespa interrupts, and sees Buddy fall quiet.

“Give them a shot, won’t you, love? Bring me back a list of your three favourites, and we’ll watch them together when you’re back with me again. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

Vespa sighs. “Anything with you sounds nice, Bud,” she says, and she’s not even kidding. “I can handle this, I’m a grown woman. It’ll be fine. I just gotta… do it, I guess.”

“That’s it, love. I have full faith in you. And you have me, just a call away, whenever you need me.”

“Can you just…” Vespa says, and her voice dies in her throat. As usual, even the slightest chance that she might speak her delusions aloud makes her cramp up in fright. Another fun one she has to deal with — that speaking them aloud somehow makes them more true. 

“Do you need to write it down?” Buddy asks, and Vespa shakes her head. 

She lies there for a moment, with her eyes closed, and breathes slowly until she feels the vice around her throat start to loosen. “Can you get Rita to check the communications for the head of security in Aviva? See if they said anything about… catching on to us.”

“Do you think they might have?” Buddy asks, her voice suddenly shifting into Captain mode, into the voice that means she’s right about to set the entire ship on red alert, and Vespa quickly cuts her off before her mind can run wild with the idea. 

“No. No, there’s no reason they could have. They didn’t seem to recognise us at the terminal and they could’ve easily just grabbed us then if they had any suspicion. Nobody would even have blinked an eye. I just…” 

There’s silence for a moment. “I see, love,” Buddy says. “I’ll have Rita send you the logs of communication between security personnel. Will that help?”

“Yeah. Yeah, thanks.”

“Anything for you, darling.” 

Vespa smiles a little at that. “I better go let Steel out of the bathroom.”

“You—pardon?”

“I banished him to the bathroom so I could talk to you. Better let him out before he starts kicking up a fuss about it. Gotta try to keep him as happy as possible so he doesn’t drive me up the wall. Lunch will probably be soon, too. The cooking’s shit, but what can we expect from a place like Aviva?”

“Is there any way you can buy some sort of alternative?”

“Yeah, but… It’s fine. Steel and I can survive, it’s not that terrible.”

“Alright,” Buddy says, concern in her voice, “But I hope you know you have my full permission—”

“Thanks, Bud. We’ll be alright.”

She frowns at her, but relents. “Okay.” 

There’s silence again. Vespa watches Buddy through the camera, and wishes she could feel the warmth radiating off her skin. Feel the fan of her breath. Touch her, experience her in 3D instead of through some shitty pixels on a shitty screen.

“I love you, Bud,” she says softly. 

“I love you too, darling. Like the moon loves the sun.”

That makes Vespa smile. It’s been years since they used that line with each other. It used to be their little catchphrase. How many nights had Vespa lain awake, unable to sleep before Buddy whispered those words into her ear? “Like the moon loves the sun,” she agrees.

Buddy blows her a kiss, and then the comms screen goes black. Vespa puts the kiss she caught to her chest and feels it warm up her heart. What? Nobody’s looking.

Then she gets up and heads towards the bathroom. The terrible old bunk creaks when she shifts, and she knocks on the door. “Steel?” she asks, “You in there?”

There’s no response. “Steel?” she asks again. “You better tell me if you’re otherwise occupied before I break in there, Steel. If I break the door down and you’re taking a shit or something I am  _ not  _ getting that image out of my head any time soon.” 

There’s still no response, and because Vespa’s mind just can’t let things  _ go,  _ she doesn’t have a choice but to check. She presses the button on the door to find it unlocked, and it swings open.

Juno is asleep in the bottom of the shower, his knees curled up to his chest. His comms is lying open near his elbow, something stupid playing on the screen — one of Rita’s movies. It looks like some sort of circus thing from the look of it.

Vespa sighs and decides she’s not dealing with it. She goes back into the room and steals the blanket off one of the beds. She throws it over Juno’s sleeping body, and returns to her own bed to wait out the rest of the time until lunch. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 👉👈 ?


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CWs: none apply for this chapter

Meanwhile, aboard the Carte Blanche.

Buddy Aurinko makes it a habit that no terrible, mission-disrupting events that threaten the lives and healths of her crew, outside of the usual mid-heist mishaps, happen very often. Holding such a habit, she believes, is somewhat beneficial to the overall smooth running of her crew. 

This, she has to admit, is certainly a habit breaker.

There are lots of things that she’s worried about in regards to the situation that they’ve found themselves in. First of all for Juno and Vespa themselves. If she allows herself to be perfectly honest and a little selfish, mostly for Vespa. 

But not only for them. There are other people on this crew that she has to be concerned about, one in particular who is already making a habit of being scarce whenever she has an opportunity to talk to him.

Peter Ransom — a man who thinks himself an enigma and presents rather more like a variety of insecurities dressed up in a very, very flashy coat. Takes one to know one, she supposes.

Well, the sash on that coat is starting to come undone, and Buddy feels rather like an unwelcome voyeur, unable to help seeing the glimpses of separation anxiety come through. She may not know what to make of most of him, but she doesn’t think there’s anything sinister behind his clear distress. It’s in the poor darling when he wrings his hands when he thinks nobody can see, in the way his leg has started to bounce under the table even while his face is entirely clear of concern. Over the three days that Juno and Vespa have been gone for, he’s withdrawn from the family as a whole as well — Buddy suspects that without Juno around to anchor him, he’s at a loss as to how to safely engage with the crew.

That seems to be something that matters a lot to Pete: safety, or the perceived lack of it. She doesn’t quite know what to do with that, how to convince him that nobody onboard has his worst interests at heart. 

Well, there’s only one thing for it: to try. So Buddy makes a big pot of Jet’s favourite kind of tea and invites Pete to join her in her quarters. 

The look on his face when he enters is nothing short of stricken. He looks about ready to jump right out of the airlock, and he eases himself down onto the chair that she’s prepared for him. “Captain Aurinko,” he says. “I hope I haven’t done anything to offend or disappoint — I had thought in our last progress review you’d said—”

“I said that you were going along fine, darling. And that’s true,” Buddy reaches across the table and pours him a cup of tea. “But fine is different to  _ well _ . Now, I’m here to ask you, Pete. Is there any reason you think you may not be doing well right at this moment?”

Peter takes the tea when she presses the mug into his hands, and blinks at her under his rapidly fogging glasses, “I… had thought I  _ was  _ doing well, Captain.”

“Not in your job performance. I mean outside of that. As a member of this family. As an individual. As… someone with a very vested interest in one of our marooned crew members.”

“Ah,” Peter says.

Buddy waits for him to elaborate. When it becomes clear that he will not, she clears her throat. “So, Pete. Anything to get off of your chest?”

He glances towards the door and then looks back at her. The smile that materialises on his face is perfectly compliant, the sort of thing she can see right through but would be seamless to an eye not trained to the many ways one may fake an emotion. 

“I appreciate your concern, Captain, but if anything were amiss, you’d be the first to know.”

If there’s anything that Buddy doesn’t like about Ransom, it’s his willingness to lie directly to her face. With a smile of all things. Perhaps some important things, she can understand — it is not her place to know every fact about the man. But either Peter Ransom is a compulsive liar, or enough needs to be kept secret about his life that he reverts to secrecy by default. 

Even that is not inherently bad; and perhaps that is the only reason that Ransom still has a place aboard this crew. That and his entanglement with Juno, who seems to know a great deal of Ransom’s secrets, speak more to them being the witness protection kind than the mark of a double agent.

“Have you talked to Juno recently?”

There is a momentary crack in the mask. Ransom’s eyebrows twitch and he the faraway look he had set on her face instantly sharpens, “I haven’t. Is something the matter?”

Buddy shakes her head, “I’m only hoping the two of you are keeping up communication. If we want everybody to get through this as easily and simply as possible, it’s important that we’re there for our— for the two of them.”

“If I may, Captain, it sounds like you’re the one who might have something to get off her chest. Is there something in particular that  _ you’re  _ worried about?” 

He’s right, of course. Buddy is sick to her stomach with worry for Vespa — and worry that Juno might spend three weeks coming up with new ways to provoke her. He has made great steps, but he isn’t always capable of the sort of sensitivity that is required with handling fraught situations. Not only that, but if there’s something Buddy knows Vespa doesn’t want Juno to know about, it’s the full extent of how her psychosis affects her. Given the circumstances, and the state Vespa had seemed to be in the last time they had called, it seems the perfect cocktail for a mental health crisis to occur. Can Juno handle that if and when it happens? Will he be able to avoid his  _ own?  _

But her worries are purely hypothetical. There’s every chance nothing at all will happen — and then what will be the use of sitting in this room fearmongering with a man who is clearly already overthinking? Buddy smiles at Ransom, “I’m sure our Vespa and Juno are more than capable of taking care of themselves, darling. Especially with people like us to rely on.”

And then there are two smiling liars in the room, and Buddy is reminded of the real reason why she cannot in good faith suspect Peter of doing anything to the crew: at the end of the day, the two of them are not so dissimilar. 

As is often the case, Ransom slips out of the room a few deftly-avoided questions later without it feeling like a great deal of progress has been made whatsoever on the front of ensuring his safety or looking after his health. 

Buddy sighs and lies back on her pillow. She can only hope that Ransom will do what he needs in his own time to look after himself. But if the similarities between the two of them run as deep as she suspects they might, she’s not entirely confident of the outcome. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> jhfhs everyones response so far has been SO SWEET AND IT REALLY MEANS SO MUCH TO ME i love you all


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this ones for you 'vespa and juno get along shirt' fans
> 
> CW: depiction of a person experiencing a depressive spiral

It’s about day five when it starts to set in. 

It has been five long days of doing fuck-all. Juno spends his time sitting on his bed making his way through the slog of movies that Rita sends him. He gets tired of movies and spends time staring at the ceiling. Once or twice, he calls Nureyev — but the truth is that calling with Nureyev is just awful.

For one thing, Vespa meant it when she said she wasn’t going in the bathroom for his calls anymore. She stays in the room with him, and Juno doesn’t care about being sappy with Peter in public (hell, they’ve been doing it aboard the Carte Blanche for months), but it fucking sucks not being able to be honest with him. He can tell Nureyev isn’t doing that well, but of course, Nureyev is far more concerned about Juno and refuses to admit it. And what can Juno do? Call him out on his lie in front of someone that already doesn’t trust him? 

He had tried taking  _ his  _ calls into the bathroom, but when he does that Vespa starts to get antsy. He can tell without asking that it gets in her brain in a not-fun way, and she always comes banging on the door asking if he’s done already ten minutes in. He doesn’t hold it against her, but having no privacy is hell when you have a boyfriend who won’t tell you anything unless he can guarantee he’s got complete privacy.

And there’s the smaller things — Juno can’t call him Nureyev. It shouldn’t matter, except it makes him feel even further away than he is. He watches one of Rita’s dumb streams about a fantasy world where people can teleport using magic wands, and wishes he had one of his own to send him straight back to his quarters on the Blanche, the bed they share.

So he doesn’t call Nureyev all that much. He hates having to look him in the face while he’s pretending everything’s fine, and pretending everything on his end is fine right back so he doesn’t get worried. That means he’s left with mealtimes, Rita’s streams, and the occasional moments of conversation he gets with Vespa when she isn’t clearly on edge to keep him occupied.

All of this is to say that he can see it coming ages before it does. Juno wakes up on the morning of day five and there’s something heavy in his chest that makes him close his bleary eyes and go back to sleep, throwing a pillow in Vespa’s general direction when she tries to wake him up later for breakfast.

When he resurfaces again, Vespa isn’t talking to him. She communicates mostly by glaring and making cutthroat gestures, and Juno stares at her and feels the heavy weight in his chest, and doesn’t give a fuck.

He doesn’t give a fuck about anything. He pulls the blankets up over his head and puts a tick firmly in the column of this being a bad brain day. The only good thing about being so miserable is that it’s easy for him to fall back asleep.

“Steel,” Vespa says an indeterminate few hours later, “Your comms has been ringing for the past five minutes. Are you gonna pick it up or what?”

“Thought you weren’t talking to me,” Juno mumbles half into his pillow. 

“Please tell me you’re not sulking in bed all day because of that,” Vespa kicks the side of the bed. “Cmon. I haven’t heard you being all disgusting with Ransom in days. Something wrong with you?”

Juno gives a dry laugh into his pillow at that, and pulls the blankets even further over his head.

Is there something wrong with Juno Steel? Boy, let’s see where we can start with that one…

Juno tries to start with that one. For maybe the first time in his entire life, his brain pretty much comes up empty.  _ He’s depressed and useless as hell,  _ his brain posits, and he blinks it aside — because yeah, maybe he is, but he doesn’t have to beat himself up about it.

Instead of the place where his self-deprecating spiral would usually go, there’s just more of the same flat, awful feeling. So… he settles back into it and tries not to be too surprised that it turns out giving therapy a decent shot can actually work to improve your mental state, sometimes. 

“Hey,” Vespa nudges the side of the bed again. Her voice seems a little softer, “You doing alright, Steel?”

“What’s’it to you?” Juno grumbles.

“I’m your doctor, dipshit,” Vespa growls. “And your… friend. I guess.” 

That actually makes Juno turn around in his blankets. He leans up and lets them fall from his head. He goes to make a joke and it dies on his tongue — he has to just… look at her.

“Huh,” he says, and then falls back into the pillows and pulls his blankets back over his head.

There’s silence. “Wait, are you kidding me?” Vespa asks, “That’s all you have to say?  _ Huh _ ?”

“No,” Juno says from his cocoon. He opens his eye and watches the grey blankets move as he breathes, “I’m glad you’re my friend, Vespa.”

She says nothing to that. He hears the floof of what could be a person falling back onto the blankets of their bed, and then she finally breaks the silence. “You didn’t have to go and make a declaration out of it.”

Despite himself, Juno laughs. 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs: none apply
> 
> ENJOY some more angst w another fave duo of mine

It’s about day eight of Juno’s quarantine when Nureyev is interrupted late at night by the sound of someone knocking evenly at his door. Slow, resounding knocks. Nureyev stares at the door and discerns they come from high up on the frame.

There’s only one person aboard the ship who could possibly knock like that, and it’s a good thing it’s Jet, because he has been trying to avoid the inevitable Rita confrontation he can feel coming on for as long as possible.

“Yes, yes, just a moment,” he says, and kicks his way through the piles of discarded items on his floor to the mirror he has against the back wall. 

He runs his fingers through his hair a few times, trying to redirect the stray strands from unprofessionally dishevelled to tastefully mussed. He touches up his eyeliner in the places it has started to fade, and stares disapprovingly at the shaky beginning of a moustache that refuses to take hold on his face. He doesn’t know what Jet wants — but he is certain what he doesn’t want to see is a man who hasn’t spent even the least amount of time tidying up his appearance. 

Once he looks a little less like a man who has spent all his day in bed, Peter goes to answer the door.

“Sorry to keep you wait—” he gets out, and then stops in horror as Rita jumps off the crate she’d dragged to his room from storage and muscles past him into his room with an evil cackle. 

“Gotcha!” she crows, throwing herself onto his bed, “You couldn’t keep hiding from me forever, Mista Ransom! Nobody beats Rita when it comes to games!”

Nureyev sighs, and closes his door. “Alright,” he concedes, “Fine.”

“Now, I know you’ve been hiding from everyone ‘cause you’re real super worried about Mista Steel but you won’t admit it cause you think it makes  _ us  _ think you’re weak, which is real stupid cause I don’t think a single person on this ship  _ isn’t  _ worried about Mista Steel and Miss Vespa and frankly it would be a lot weirder if you weren’t worried about them at all, but anyways we don’t gotta talk about how upset you are if you don’t want and instead we can just watch movies together!”

As usual, Nureyev finds himself feeling emotionally drained by the time Rita finally stops speaking, both of her arms thrown in the air and her little chest heaving while she catches her breath. Nureyev steps weakly over to the side of the bed and sits down beside her.

“I appreciate your concern, Miss Rita,” he says, “But I assure you I’m doing no less than well. Juno and I have been communicating, and he seems to be doing fine.”

His gut twists at the lie. It’s natural to him to lie about most things — it is always useful to cover one’s true intentions and meanings even if not strictly necessary. It leaves less of a trail behind. But this lie covers up only his own failings when it has come to keeping up to date with how Juno is feeling. Juno hasn’t talked to him at all over the last three days, or answered any of his messages except for a smiley face or occasional ‘I’m fine. Just sleepy’, both of which Nureyev feels aren’t accurate reflections of his state.

Rita glances at him, “I don’t think you’re telling me the truth, Mista Ransom.”

Nureyev looks back at her. She has gotten to know him almost as well as Juno has — in no small part due to Juno’s influence, he thinks. It has been… easier to adjust to, it being a slow process that happens largely outside of his control, as much as it has been an uncomfortable one. He knows he can’t quite stop Juno from letting things slip to Rita, and also trusts that the things Juno does say aren’t threatening enough to his safety for him to be  _ too  _ worried about.

It’s either that, or she is open enough to say what the others must think of him all the time: that he’s a liar and a cheat. That he isn’t the kind of person any one of them wants on their crew. That he’s doing a poor job of keeping hidden the concerns that gnaw away at his synapses. 

Rita tsks her tongue and rolls her eyes, “I knew it. You’re doing that thing where you look at me all sad like and think about bad things again, aren’t you?”

“I was not,” Peter says haughtily.

“Look, Mista Ransom. I know things’ve been real tough for you and Mista Steel, okay?”

“You… do? What has he told you?” Nureyev asks.

“Well. Nothing actually, but in all the streams this is the kind of stuff the really nice best friend says to make  _ her  _ really nice best friend who also happens to be dating her other best friend feel better.”

“Oh,” Nureyev had been leaning towards her, anticipating her answer. Now he leans back again and clears his throat. “Thank you for your concern, Rita, but I’ll be alright.”

“But—”

Before she can finish her sentence, something switches in Nureyev. He can suddenly feel how open and exposed he is, and the second he does -- like a Rangian anemone exposed to the light -- he shrinks in on himself.

“I’m afraid this is non-negotiable,” Nureyev stands up from his bed and makes for the door. “I am doing perfectly fine, thank you, and even if you don’t believe me it is not your place to try and convince me you know otherwise. If I need your help, my dear, I assure you you’ll be the first to know. Now, ta-ta.” 

“But Mista Ransom!” Rita exclaims.

“Thank you, Rita,” Nureyev opens the door and gestures out of it.

Rita glares at him. She hops off his bed and pokes him in the stomach as she walks past him out of his door. Then she turns to keep glaring at him. “That was real mean of you, Mista Ransom. I was only trying to help!”

“I’m sure I’ll let you know if I need it,” this lie goes smoothly, and Nureyev shuts the door easily on Rita and sighs.

She thumps on the door once. Then she shouts, “Well I still got streams going on in my room any time you want them Mista Ransom, okay?!”

Nureyev walks back to his bed and falls unceremoniously back on it. Out of habit, he reaches for his comms and hopes for a message from Juno. There is none. He frowns.

_ Please let me know how you’re doing, love. I worry about you. _

He deletes the message before Juno can see it, and writes instead:

_ I love you, Juno. _

He stares at the words on the screen, and feels how hollow they seem written rather than spoken aloud. He kicks his legs aimlessly, and drafts a third message.

_ I hope to talk to you soon, dear. Sleep well. x _

He sends it off and knows already he won’t get a reply. Nureyev sighs and puts his comms down on the bed again. 

This week has been tough, even by Nureyev’s standards — and he once spent a week stuck underground in a cave which had an opening that had frozen over with the sudden snowstorm that had hit the asteroid he was thieving on. 

It turns out he doesn’t realise how far living on the Carte Blanche has brought down his walls until he’s left alone and suddenly Nureyev is standing in the middle of a group of people who can see into him far too clearly, and none of which he trusts to keep him safe. Juno usually helps — he takes the attention off of him when the others get a little too nosy and is quick to defend him if people point out his odd behaviour. Without Juno here, he feels seconds away at all times from one of the other crew members capitalising on his vulnerability and deciding to interrogate him.

So far, both Buddy and Rita have tried. He doesn’t trust either of them — Buddy because anything she could want to hear from Peter he assumes she wants to use against him. Rita similarly, but for different reasons. He hasn’t fully cracked Rita’s intentions, but he knows that she’s sharp, and smart, incredibly invested in his personal life for some reason, and almost infamously loose lipped when it comes to secrets. He doesn’t trust her with anything — she could too easily be tempted by Buddy into spilling everything that he’s told her.

His anxiety is getting harder to hide. An unfortunate side effect of the way he’s begun to teach the doors in his mind to unlock at will is that the locks simply don’t hold as well as they used to. He finds himself unable to sleep at night — not an unfamiliar situation, but one that is exacerbated compared to his usual anxious state. He finds himself, at times, shaking when he stands in the kitchen and somebody comes into the room behind him. There’s always the threat that he will be pounced upon. 

It’s tiring, and so he spends most of his days in his room or slipping around the ship at times he knows the others won’t be around to find him. He practises meditation when he can gather the peace of mind to focus on it, and watches shows when he can’t, and tries with all his might not to think of Juno Steel. 

Three weeks, he thinks, cannot be over soon enough.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: depictions of hallucinations & paranoid thoughts

It takes about five days before Steel starts getting out of bed again. 

Vespa has been watching him, unable really to do anything to help him. She knows a lot about mental health, to put it lightly, and a part of that comes in knowing that she may be a doctor, but she knows fuck all about helping people through spirals. She makes sure he eats, tries to tempt him into watching his shitty streams when she can, and mostly leaves him to his rest. 

She can’t help but feel sorry for him, even though it feels all wrong. It could always be a trap — maybe, her brain tells her when she lies awake at night, maybe Steel’s in on it too and if she falls asleep before he does she’ll wake up in the middle of the night restrained with Steel calling in the spaceport security.

It’s stupid. The authorities want Steel just as much as they want her. Even so, she still can’t sleep before she confirms he’s asleep by walking around to his bed and watching him snore.

It’s not just her paranoid thoughts that are starting to get more and more creative, either. One night while she waits for Juno to fall asleep, she sees something — some dark, goopy liquid — start to seep in from the bottom of the door. As she watches, it begins to take shape, reforming into a vaguely humanoid figure that takes a step towards her, and then another. When it reaches the bed and reaches out to her, she throws herself into the pillows, her arms over her head to protect herself.

She doesn’t feel it. It goes right through her, of course, because it doesn’t  _ exist _ . 

She shakes her head, once, twice, and decides that she doesn’t have a good chance of sleeping before Steel wakes up again. 

The next morning, the two breakfast trays sit untouched in the collection chute long after breakfast. Vespa can’t get out of bed. She just… can’t. She can’t because if she does, it’s going to set off an alarm and the guards will be right in here to take her away. It doesn’t make sense but she can’t convince herself it’s not somehow true, and so she lies awake staring at the food and hoping to hell that Steel doesn’t say anything about it. 

Juno shifts around in the blanket cocoon he’s been holed up in for days, “Vespa? You alright over there?”

“Fine,” she snaps back at him.

“You never miss a meal,” he says. 

He hasn’t noticed a goddamn thing in the last few days while he’s been deep in his head. Of course he has to get better just in time to watch Vespa fall prey to some stupid, childish thinking. There’s a monster in her closet, there’s a ghost in the bathroom, there’s a high powered laser grid attached to the floor via pressure plates…

“I said I’m fine, Steel. Drop it.”

He doesn’t say anything else about it (small mercies), but she startles when she hears the blankets shuffle. She glances over and sees that Juno is sitting up in his bed, his one eye narrowed at her. 

She wants to tell him not to stand up if he doesn’t want to get diced alive. She wants to accuse him of taking this moment to attack, while she’s down and can’t do anything about it.

Juno stands up.

Nothing happens. 

Of course nothing happens. It’s not like her stupid thoughts were actually  _ real.  _ He gets out of his bed and stumbles sleepily around hers to the collection chute. He grabs her breakfast tray, and brings it over to the bed, putting it down on the pillow beside her.

She sits up in her bed and glares up at him, “You smell.”

Juno rolls his eye, “Oh, really? I wouldn’t have expected that, considering the five star care I’ve been giving myself over the last almost week.”

She picks up the breakfast tray and starts to pick at the plastic. “Are you feeling any better?”

Juno signs and sits down on the edge of her bed, jostling the entire bed frame. “Yeah,” he says. “I, uh… A little better, yeah. Thanks for… looking after me through that whole thing. Making sure I didn’t starve myself. I know I’m not exactly… pleasant to deal with, when I spiral.” 

“I’m your doctor,” Vespa says. “It’s my job. That’s all.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Juno agrees, and seems like he’s about to say something more. Then he shrugs, “I’m gonna go have a shower now.”

“Good.”

He walks around the room gathering up his stuff and then disappears into the bathroom. Vespa eats her breakfast and silently keeps an ear out to hear if there’s any possible way Juno might be faking his shower. He wouldn’t have any reason to, of course. Not unless he was up to something Vespa should know about…

Vespa looks over the side of her bed. She considers it for a long moment, and then slowly, carefully, she lets her feet touch the floor.

Nothing happens.

Of course nothing happens.

Vespa sighs in relief, and goes to dispose of the packeting of her shitty spaceport breakfast.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: more discussions of psychosis and paranoid thoughts

Juno isn’t exactly sure what he should do about helping Vespa. 

Things are clearly not very good for her — things aren’t exactly very good for him either, but at least they’re starting to be on the way up again. He hasn’t stopped being sad, but the chokehold that has been pinning him down in bed has loosened up and allowed him to actually move around their tiny little quarters.

He tries to ask Vespa if he can buy things to keep him entertained. If he had a credit for every time she insisted that they would not be spending ship money on the trinkets from the in-quarantine store panel, it would be enough to get Nureyev out of debt.

Well, probably not, actually. If there’s anything Juno knows about Nureyev’s debt it’s that it’s not going away any time soon. 

But this isn’t about him, this is about her. Vespa clearly hasn’t been sleeping very often — her face, usually gaunt, is more drawn than usual, with dark circles under her eyes. She’s also getting twitchier, quicker to respond to every little thing Juno does with suspicion. Twitchy to things that aren’t there, either. 

And Juno doesn’t care, obviously. He hasn’t cared right from the beginning. The only reaction he’s had to Vespa’s psychosis, really, is embarrassment that, first, he knew so little about psychosis, but second, the amount of ableist language and beliefs he’d been conditioned to have, and the fact that he’d never picked up on them before he had someone in front of him that made him suddenly self conscious every time he went to say  _ what are you, crazy? _

But he also knows that Vespa isn’t the type to want Juno’s help at all with this stuff. Which is sort of good, because Juno has no idea what to do at all in the first place, but it also sucks because Juno’s sure he could help  _ somehow _ . Instead, he just has to sit here and watch Vespa struggle and try to give her as much privacy as he can. 

He spends a lot of time in the bathroom. 

It comes to a head one night when Juno is woken up with hands on his shoulders, shaking him.

“Steel!” Vespa hisses, “They’re here—they’re breaking in, we have to get up, get your goddamn gun!”

“Wh—” sleep deprived and head spinning, Juno dives under his pillow with one hand, where he keeps his blaster out of habit. With the other hand, he pushes Vespa out of the way, and offloads four bolts of laser blast into the door of their quarantine.

_ Pew pew pew pew.  _

All that’s left in the silence that follows is the sound of Vespa’s breathing and the acrid smell of laser smoke quickly filling up the room. Juno coughs, and pulls his shirt up over his nose. “Vespa?”

She still sounds out of breath, “…Yeah?”

“There, uh. Wasn’t anyone breaking in, was there?”

She hesitates a long time before she answers. “No.”

Now that Juno’s vision is starting to clear, he can see the dents that his gun has left in the inside of the door. “Do you think they’re going to make us pay for those damages?” 

Vespa sighs long and low, “Yeah.”

Juno clears his throat. “I think we should probably talk about this, huh?”

“Not right now, Steel,” Vespa sounds exhausted. 

“You gonna be able to get to sleep?” 

He can see the thin outline of Vespa’s shoulders shrugging, and she gets wearily to her feet. 

“I’ll, uh… talk to you tomorrow, Vespa,” Juno says.

“Yeah.”

Juno snuggles back into his blankets and is asleep within minutes, even with the shitty mattress and the laser-blast smell in the air. 

The next morning, a letter comes in via the collection chute with their breakfast. It politely informs the two of them that any damages found in the room will be charged to the parties involved in those damages, kind regards, Aviva upper management. It could almost be coincidental except for the fact that it obviously isn’t. 

Juno sighs and passes the note to Vespa. Then he sits himself down on the end of her bed and begins to pick at his breakfast tray. 

“So,” he says, “Is now a good time?”

“Of course it isn’t,” Vespa growls at him. She pushes a forkful of food into her mouth and then talks with her mouth full as she chews, “But no time ever will be, so fine.”

“Okay,” Juno says. “So, uh. What happened last night?”

Vespa snorts. “You wanna take a guess at that one, _dear_ _detective_?” 

She sneers it, but Juno tries hard to let it roll off without reacting. He’s getting better at doing that when it matters — and there’s no time it matters more than in the beginning stages of a sensitive discussion.

“Alright. So you, uh, saw something… saw people breaking into our place, and it, uh. Freaked you out?”

Vespa rolls her eyes at him and swallows down her mouthful of food. “I’ve got delusions,” she says. “Dunno if you have any idea how psychosis works, Steel, but a part of it includes getting thoughts that don’t make any sense. They’re stupid, and illogical, and you don’t have a choice whether or not you believe in them.”

“That… sounds tough,” Juno says, “I’m sorry.”

“Save your pity, I don’t care. I shouldn’t have to explain my goddamn brain to you at all, except it’s going to be relevant if we want to get out of here without any more extra costs,” Vespa points her fork at him when she talks in a way that makes the scar across his stomach tingle. 

“Now, my brain has decided Aviva security knows that we’re in here,” Vespa continues. “I don’t know what evidence I have to prove it, except I don’t have any evidence to disprove it either, which means there’s every chance I  _ could  _ be right. If Aviva knows we’re here, it would be easy for them to force us into quarantine. Call a fake pandemic scare, lock us in a room together, then send the intergalactic forces in to come and arrest us. Sell us out to Dark Matters. Whoever’s the highest bidder.”

“So your, uh… hallucinations have been following the same kind of theme? People swarming in to get us, and stuff,” Juno assumes.

Vespa shrugs, “My hallucinations are whatever they are. Plenty of ones that have nothing to do with that pesky thought. But… that’s what happened last night.”

“Alright,” Juno says. “What can we do to make sure things are a little easier for you?”

Vespa looks uncomfortable for a good while before she finally talks. “I guess… if I ask you if you can see something? And you don’t get to ask  _ any  _ goddamn questions about anything I ask you, alright? But… if I could check in with you like that.”

“Cool. Yeah, of course. That sounds easy,” Juno says.

“And maybe,” Vespa adds, casting a sarcastic eye his way, “you should work on your shoot-first approach to things.” 

“Firstly, the hell else was I supposed to do with you yelling at me like that? Secondly, now you just sound like my old HCPD captain.”

Vespa frowns, “I thought cops were all about shooting first.”

“Yeah,” Juno shrugs, “Apparently it’s a different story when you sleep overnight in the office and your captain is the first person in in the morning.”

Vespa’s eyebrows raise, “Holy fuck. What happened?”

“Stun blast to the shoulder. Didn’t take that long for them to recover from, but I was suspended for like a month. Should’ve quit while I was ahead, to be honest.”

“You know,” Vespa says, “shooting a cop might be the closest thing to impressive you’ve ever done, Steel.”

“You think that’s impressive? Once I mugged the president of Venus,” Juno says, and basks in the rare pleasure of watching Vespa’s mouth drop open. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you all are enjoying the bonding vibes!!!! more angst coming right up lmfao 
> 
> remember 2 drop a fat kudos or comment if u enjoyed 😫😫😫😫😫


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> qpr jet buddy rites

Well, when things inevitably do fall to shit, there is at least one person that Buddy Aurinko can rely on.

Jet is the kind of man who likes to sleep early and rise early. It’s a perpetually annoying trait of his, purely because it sets the hours that the two of them are mutually awake entirely helter skelter. Buddy is of the opinion that the night is too wonderful a time to be wasted asleep, and often finds herself catching her Z’s past the hour of three or four in the morning.

Of course, she also finds herself captaining a ship, which requires her being prepared for breakfast and the daily briefing by 9.30, but she’s never particularly been one for concerning herself with laws and rules of thumb, and especially not  _ recommended hours of sleep per night.  _

She manages to catch Jet at four in the afternoon ship time. Which, quite frankly, is a terrible time for anybody to be having any sort of deep and meaningful discussion, but her Jet isn’t the kind to bother about that sort of thing. And besides: they’re in space. If she really cared that much, she could simply flip a few buttons and switches in the control panel and change the on-board ship’s sleep cycle by a few pesky hours until it was a much more aesthetically pleasing time. 

She doesn’t care that much. She finds Jet and lures him into her room with the usual irresistible promise of a large pot of decaffeinated Jovian tea.

“Buddy,” he says as he manoeuvres his large form through the doorway. “Something is the matter.” 

“Why, how perceptive of you, darling! What was it that tipped you off? The fact that Ransom has been moping around the ship like a dehydrated cat, the fact the two of our crew members are trapped somewhere we can’t get to them in close quarters for another week, or the fact that I called you here with tea?”

“The latter,” Jet says matter of factly. “Ransom is often moping, as you put it. And I had believed that you had the situation with Juno and Vespa under control.” 

Buddy sighs, “Yes, well. There are a lot of things I seem to have under control, darling. Do close the door behind you and come sit down, dear.” 

Jet does as Buddy requests and deposits himself down in the chair she still has set up from her attempted interrogation with Ransom. 

“I have been somewhat concerned,” he admits. “You are not often as silent as you have been recently. I had given you the benefit of the doubt in assuming you were simply busy. I had thought you would not hide it from me if something were the matter.”

It’s not an accusation, but Buddy runs her fingers through her hair and feels guilty about it anyway. She sighs and reaches forward to pour two large cups of the tea. 

“Yes. Yes, that is a fair assumption to make. And I should have brought it to your attention earlier. I’m terribly sorry, darling.” 

“There is nothing to forgive. Tell me what is going on for you.”

Jet picks up his cup of tea and sits back in his chair. His dark eyes stay focused on Buddy’s face — Buddy refers to this as his  _ listening pose _ , secretly in her head. He always has been a good listener, and he’s the one person that Buddy happens to trust with what she has to say to him. 

She hasn’t prepared a single word, and that already proves a severe challenge, even if she’d done it intentionally. She knows that to be fully honest with him, she will have to go into this fully improvised. Given a piece of paper and a pen, she would dolly up her fears to be more appropriate to his ears.

“To be honest with you darling, I’m scared shitless,” Buddy says, and laughs herself a breathless, nervous little chuckle. “And that’s something I don’t say lightly. It’s not a very comfortable feeling having my Vespa so far away from me, especially when we have only just found each other again.” 

As is par for the course, Jet will say absolutely nothing until Buddy has gotten it all off of her chest. So she continues to speak to the silent space he leaves for her and trusts him to know what to say to it all. 

“I am worried that even though Juno and Vespa are quarantined together, they may not be… in a good enough place to support each other at all. Vespa doesn’t like to show weakness, Jet, you understand. Especially not with her psychosis. She perceives us all to think of it as some… terrible, shameful secret that she has to hide evidence of,” Buddy chews on her lip for a moment, “She may not have a choice but to show a weaker side of herself to Juno while they’re stuck together in such close quarters. It’s true that Juno has made many strides towards being able to support her better, but at the same time, is he really in the right sort of place to deal with a psychotic break?”

“Not only that,” Buddy continues, “But I simply don’t feel the same without Vespa with me. I know that she’s capable, and only a phone call away if I were to really need her… but as stupid as it sounds, Jet, it simply feels horrible sleeping without my partner in my bed with me. 

Buddy hears her own words and sighs, “I’m sure this must sound very silly to you. I can’t expect you to fully understand, darling.” 

She sits back in her own chair, exhausted from her outburst. It’s not exactly everything she’d wanted to say, and half as eloquent, but she knows one thing about Jet Sequiliak: she can trust him to sort through the mess. 

Jet nods his head slowly and drinks his tea.

“It seems that you are worried that Vespa will not be able to complete this time away from you,” Jet says at last. “I think it would be useful for you to remember that she has spent a long time away from you before, and managed exceptionally well, even when one would expect her to have been long dead.” 

“It seems likely that the worst that may happen is embarrassment on Vespa’s behalf,” Jet says. “I agree that this is not anybody’s first preference, and is best avoided. However, I also trust in Juno’s proclivity to send a call back to the Carte Blanche if anything were to happen that may endanger either he or Vespa. I also imagine the Aviva security includes personnel who are capable of dealing with all manner of health issues, including mental. It is possible that Juno or Vespa both may have some way of contacting staff and altering them if anything were to go wrong.”

“And deliver the both of them directly into the hands of authorities,” Buddy deadpans.

“It is likely that if the authorities were to have recognised Juno or Vespa from publicly released APBs, the two of them would already have been apprehended,” Jet says thoughtfully. “I can understand your concern at being separated from Vespa. I understand it is not an experience that either of you would like to be prolonged. Have you been keeping in contact frequently?”

Buddy sighs, “As frequently as we can, darling, but it’s not quite the same.”

“Maybe not, but it is still better than having no communication at all,” Jet says, and is as usual, entirely correct. “Still, this knowledge alone is not likely to make you feel any better about being separated from Vespa. Would you feel more comfortable if I were to stay in your room with you?” 

Buddy blinks, and then laughs, “Jet Sequliak in my bed?”

“I may not be able to relate to the experience of being separated from a romantic partner,” Jet powers on, entirely seriously, “But I have known what it is like to be separated from people who are far closer to me than the simple label of ‘friends’ or ‘family’ can allow. You are one such person. Rita is another.” 

Buddy reaches across the table and takes Jet’s spare hand in hers, “Jet, you will always be much more than a friend or family member to me. You are as much my life partner as Vespa is, in your own special way.”

Jet smiles at that, and squeezes her hand in his gently. Quickly, though, the smile fades into a frown.

“I am incredibly upset to hear that you have been so lonely. It is something I would never wish to inflict on you. I would have asked you to come to me sooner if I had had any idea.”

“I know, darling,” Buddy says, “To be honest, I had been hiding it from you. Even though I knew you would have the perfect advice for me, I still felt somewhat… well, reluctant. I can’t exactly tell you why. I suppose I was embarrassed to have gone through such incredible things with you and be stopped by something as silly as being separated from my girlfriend for a measly three weeks.”

“Nothing you have ever opened up to me about has been silly, Buddy Aurinko,” Jet says. “I can understand how taxing this experience has been upon you. When it comes down to matters of emotion, what matters is the intensity of what we feel - not our perceived worthiness of being able to feel that emotion based on what has occurred.” 

“Jet, darling… I don’t know what I’ve ever done to deserve you.”

“Those are almost the exact same words you offered me in a similar period of my life, Buddy.”

“Well!” Buddy laughs, “Once again, Jet, you prove how useful it is to have someone who will kindly remind you of all of the advice you gave that you have thrown out of the window entirely when it comes to helping yourself.” 

“I’m sorry that you have been struggling.”

“Oh, I know, darling. You don’t need to apologise to me. You’re exactly what I needed, Jet. You always are. Now what’s to say that you get into some comfier clothes and we watch a movie together, hm? I know there’s a few that we have been meaning to see that we never did.”

“Of course,” Jet says.

Buddy refills the pot of Jovian tea while she waits for him to return. She putters around the room tidying up her bed and making sure anything that shouldn’t be seen is entirely hidden away before she then sets the pot of tea down on her bedside table and makes room in her bed for Jet to join her.

Jet returns momentarily in a full button down two piece pyjama set. It is pink with little white bunnies all over it, and when she sees it Buddy can’t help but laugh.

“Darling, where on earth did you acquire such a thing!”

“Rita bought it for me,” he says. “It compliments my eyes.”

“That it certainly does, darling. The pink suits just wonderfully with that beautiful black. Now come over here, you, and get comfortable.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> spare comments are appreciated 😫


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is a gift from me to you

“Steel.”

Juno looks up from his comms, where he’s been hovering over the call button for the last fifteen minutes, “What’s up?”

“Can you hear that?” Vespa asks. The footsteps in the hall outside are too loud for even Steel not to be able to hear, surely. They sound close, maybe a matter of seconds from bursting into the room. 

Juno pauses to listen out. The hum of the ship is barely audible underneath the thudding of boots in the absolute silence. Then Juno shakes his head, “Uh, nothing on this end.”

The footsteps stomp past the door and continue down the hallway. Vespa sighs and hugs a pillow to her chest. She gets out her comms and opens up a shitty game she downloaded a few days back. She’s not usually the one to fall for terrible comms game ads, but desperate times… 

She wonders when Steel’s gonna work up the guts to call. She doesn’t know what’s going on between the two of them, but it must be something. Steel hasn’t been all disgustingly sappy in ages — for the first time since their journey on the Carte Blanche, Vespa might have to openly admit she’s being more affectionate with her S/O than he is. At least she and Buddy text every day even if they can’t call. 

She hears a low sigh from the bed over, and then the tell-tale dial tone of a connecting call. It doesn’t take long before the phone picks up. 

“ _ Juno _ .”

Ransom sounds fraught. “Darling,” he says, “You haven’t contacted me beyond a few words in texts for almost a week. Is everything alright? Are you doing okay? I have been worried sick.”

“I’m sorry,” Juno says. His voice sounds small and half stuck in his throat. “I’m really sorry… Ransom. I know it was shitty of me to drop off the map like that.”

Juno sighs, “The truth is I haven’t been doing so hot. I, uh… spiralled pretty hard. I’m okay now,” he says quickly, over the wounded sound Ransom makes on the other side of the phone. “But, um. Things were tough for a while there.”

“And Vespa? Did she simply stand by and do nothing while you were suffering?”

Vespa isn’t meant to be listening in, but she almost spits something scathing in Ransom’s direction about taking more care of his boyfriend than he is. Before she can do so, Juno answers him.

“No, no, babe, calm down. I know you’re just worried, but Vespa’s been great. Only reason I kept eating through the whole thing. But if you can’t shake me out of a depressive spiral, you know she wouldn’t be able to either. It just… was how it was. Nothing anybody could’ve done.”

There’s a beleaguered sigh from the other end of the phone, “Why didn’t you tell me?” 

“I…” Juno starts, and stops. When he speaks again, his voice breaks, “I’m sorry. Talking to you just kind of feels… bad. Not— not because of you, or anything, just…”

Vespa tries to inconspicuously lay her head in the pillow with her arm over the other ear. She feels really unwelcome to this conversation, but she doesn’t want to make a big deal out of leaving in the middle of Juno pouring his heart out. 

Juno sniffles before he sneaks again, “I just miss you,” he admits. “A lot. And I… I talk to you here, and you tell me you’re fine, which is clearly a fucking lie. So then I don’t want to worry you, and I tell you I’m fine, and that makes me feel like shit, because I hate lying to you.” 

“And I hate that I can’t touch you, or kiss you,” Juno continues. “And I hate that I can’t call you by your name. I didn’t think it would matter but it turns out it really fucking matters a lot. I hate talking to Ransom.” 

“Juno…” Ransom says quietly, “Love…”

“It just feels like you’re so far away. I just miss being with you. Being honest with you.”

There’s silence for a long time on the other side of the phone. Jesus Christ, of all the things Vespa could accidentally overhear, she’s pretty sure she’d prefer hearing the two of their terrible attempts at phone sex over this.

“I meant it when I said that I’ve been worried sick,” Ransom says when he talks again, and his voice sounds… different. “More than that, Juno, it’s been uncomfortable being on this ship without you. Buddy and Rita both will not stop pestering me, asking me questions of how I am and what they can do for me.”

“They’re just trying to help, baby…” Juno says. 

Ransom makes an uncomfortable sound in the back of his throat. “I suppose so. But I feel… afraid. Without you here to fall back on. There are so many nights I wish I could hold you in my arms and talk through all my concerns. To be perfectly honest with you, my love, I also haven’t been faring very well at all. I haven’t been sleeping. I miss you so much it feels like I ache with it.”

“Ransom…”

“But I’m not telling you that to be sorry for me. Trust me when I say Juno that that would be the absolute worst outcome of this conversation, from my perspective. I am telling you this for the sake of total honesty. So that I might feel closer to you even though you’re so far away.”

“I… appreciate it. I know it takes you a lot to say these things,” Juno says. “Look, Rans. Rita may be nosy, but I promise you she doesn’t want anything sinister out of you. Maybe see if you can try to watch a movie or two with her, alright? If you get her talking about her streams, she’ll totally forget any questions she had to ask of you, even if she did have any, which honestly I doubt.”

“I’m just a phone call away if you need to talk, honey,” he continues. “And maybe I can’t touch you, but I can tell you how badly I wish your head was in my lap right now. I miss feeling your hair between my fingers.” 

Ransom laughs softly. He sighs, “I’m sorry that I kept this from you. I was so worried about making your time away from me worse than it already was.”

“It’s alright. I lied to you, too,” Juno taps his comms with his fingers, and sighs. “I guess, uh. I guess we’re both still getting used to the whole perfect communication thing.”

“There is also always text,” Ransom says. “I appreciate that you can’t call me what you may like, Juno. I really do appreciate your efforts to respect my wishes on that front. But Rita’s encrypted channels means you’re more than welcome to call me anything you like there.”

“It’s not quite the same,” Juno mumbles.

“But it’s what we have, darling. And there’s not long now before you’ll be back in my arms, and we can talk honestly to each other to our heart’s content. I miss hearing your voice, too, love.”

Juno sniffles again. “I’m really sorry I kept this from you for so long.”

“You’re alright, Juno. I love you with all of my heart.”

Juno has maybe the weirdest reaction to being told he’s loved that Vespa’s ever heard. He makes a terrible choked sound in his throat.

“Fuck,” he says, and it comes out of him harsh and broken. 

“Juno?” Ransom sounds terrified.

“I— no, it’s okay, just. Fuck. I’ve been thinking about that, too. How I’m a million fucking miles away from you right now and I can’t even give you the courtesy of telling you that I—“

His voice seems to stop in his throat. Whatever it is that he can’t say, it obviously means a lot to him, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what it is. 

“Juno, we’ve had this conversation,” Ransom sounds almost like he’s pleading with him. “I promise you, my dear, that I know. I know you love me.”

“You deserve to hear it from me,” Juno says. “I want to tell you so badly.”

“Juno. It’s alright, I promise you,” Ransom sounds even more worked up by the second, and Juno makes a sound suspiciously like a sob.

“I’m sorry,” his voice is watery and broken. “I’m sorry. I’ll talk to you later. I’m sorry.”

“Juno—“

The comms disconnects. Juno falls face-first into his pillow and starts to sob in earnest. Vespa tries to give him what privacy he can while he cries it all out. A cursory glance shows that his shoulders are shaking, and for lack of a way to comfort him, she waits it out until the tears finally subside, and he’s left wrung out and limp on his mattress. 

Vespa lies very still as well. She’s not sure whether Steel wants to be left alone — if it was her, she would probably bite anyone who got close enough to try and give her any comforting. But Steel’s not exactly… secret about his emotions. In fact, he’s been louder and louder about them over the time that she’s gotten to know him. He’s quick to admit when he’s upset or overreacting or triggered by something someone said or an insecurity they poked at (jokes about him being a technological caveman got put on the ‘not okay’ list a long while ago, for example). 

So after a moment to fully process everything she just heard, Vespa slips off her bed. She walks as quietly as she can over to Juno’s bunk, and then sits down on the edge of it.

Juno lifts his head to look at her. “Yeah, I know,” he mumbles, “I’m being all loud and annoying. Sorry, alright?”

“It’s, uh… not that.”

The problem here is that Vespa has a lot of thoughts and feelings, but that doesn’t make her any good in this situation. Really, she’s a hard shell encircling a soft body full of emotions and insecurities and tender spots that need to be addressed and reassured. It’s letting that part of her out that’s the difficult bit. It happens naturally around Buddy — because being soft and tender always happens naturally around Buddy — but despite everything they’ve been through together, she still doesn’t  _ trust  _ Juno. Not in a way that matters. So she feels resistance build in her throat every step of the way as she places her hand on Juno’s shoulder.

“Look, kid,” she starts, and feels weird about it — so does he by the look he gives her — but she tries to power through. “I know it seems like it’s a big deal right now, but, um. I used to have the same problem with people. Telling them how I felt about them.”

“Oh, great. You were listening to that entire thing,” Juno stuff his face back into his pillow. “Save it, Vespa. I know I’m pathetic.” 

“No, I mean it,” Vespa pushes. She brings both her legs up onto the bed and sits crosslegged beside him. “Look, Steel, I didn’t just suddenly become paranoid thanks to my psychosis. Well, in a clinical sense, sure but— whatever. I’ve always been superstitious. Basically since I was a kid.”

“Thanks, Vespa,” Juno says drily into his pillow, and Vespa feels frustration rise in her like the tide.

“Just—I’m  _ trying  _ to be nice here, so shut up and listen. When Buddy and I first got together, there was this terrible inevitability I could see coming, and it really fucking sucked for me. Because I knew how she felt about me, and I was pretty damn sure about how I felt for her. But I didn’t want her to tell me that she loved me, because…”

Vespa sighs, “Because I had this dumb thought that if you say it out loud, you’re basically asking for something bad to happen. Like, that if the universe heard you admitting that something mattered to you, it would do anything in its power to take it away from you as soon as possible.” 

Juno finally shifts. He rolls onto his back and looks up at Vespa.

“I…yeah,” he says, softly. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

“And I knew it was dumb, but it didn’t stop me from freaking out about it. And then when Buddy finally told me, I thought that was going to be the end of our relationship forever.” 

Juno looks up at her, clearly waiting for her to continue. When she doesn’t, he prompts, “Uh… and?”

“ _ And _ obviously it wasn’t, okay?” Vespa huffs, “We… found ways around it. We found other ways to communicate it to each other until I was in a better place with myself and I could say it to her face and believe that nothing bad was going to happen.”

“My point is,” she says, “relationships can still work if you suffer from shit like this. It’s not the be all and end all of the way the two of you work. Ransom doesn’t need to hear you say those dumb little words — it’s clear as day that you love him. You guys are basically all over each other whenever you get the chance. And sure, maybe sometimes it can cause a little bit of stress and tension, or feel uncomfortable, but at the end of the day, Steel…”

Vespa sighs, “You have each other. That’s what matters. Not those dumb little words. You’ll get there one day. Or you won’t ever get there, but you’ll find some other way to share it with each other. You don’t have to beat yourself up over it.”

Juno looks up at her for a long moment. She wonders for a second if he’s about to start bursting into tears again, when he sits up suddenly and wraps his arms around her. 

The angle they’re on is terrible, and his wet face is pressing into his shoulder. Vespa squirms until they’re slightly more comfortable and then… pats his back? That seems like a comforting thing to do after all.

She has to admit: Juno’s arms are big and his tummy is soft and he makes for not a bad hugger, all things considered. 

Then her patience for physical touch runs out and she squirms again until he lets her go. 

“Don’t count on getting away with that ever again, Steel,” she hisses. “And also, warn me next time.” 

“Right—sorry, fuck,” Juno says. “Just, um…” he wipes his eye with the back of his hand. “Thanks, Vespa. I guess I know those things are true, logically, but hearing it from someone else… it means a lot.” 

Vespa shrugs. Then something else hits her — a thought that had popped into her mind when Juno had told Ransom to go watch movies with Rita. She clears her throat, “I don’t suppose you feel like watching a movie?”

Juno laughs, “Yeah. Thanks, Vespa, but you don’t have to keep pitying me. I’ll be okay.”

“No, I— want to. Watch one. Buddy asked me to tell her which ones of them were my top favourites. So, uh… maybe go have a shower, and for the sake of all that is good in this goddamn world, text your boyfriend, alright? You just hung up on him while crying your eyes out, and he’s probably a wreck. I would be.”

“Right,” Juno says. “Right, fuck,” and he starts searching for his comms in the crumpled up blankets. “Yeah, okay. I’ll do that, and then clean myself up, and then… I think I can think of a movie you’ll like, Vespa.”

“I’ll get us snacks, too,” Vespa says, and Juno looks at her with his eyebrows high on his head. 

“You what?”

“We’re already going to spend enough fixing that goddamn door we blasted, and that was my fault,” Vespa grumbles. “Another twenty creds on popcorn won’t hurt.”

Juno grins, and goes to hug her again. She quickly evades his grip. 

“Don’t,” she warns, but it doesn’t erase Juno’s smile.


	11. Chapter 11

Nureyev’s first stop after the frankly traumatic call he had with Juno is to the bathroom to wash his face. He’s discovered over the last few months that his face has a habit of getting awfully blotchy when he’s being honest, and it needs some moisturiser and a good soak to properly calm back down again. He pockets his foundation so that he’ll be able to give himself a touch up, and slips down the hallway to the bathroom.

The entire time, his mind is absolutely buzzing. It continues to — an almost nonsensical jumble of thoughts, all of which are too fast to catch and examine individually, but add up to a total feeling of deep unease — until he finishes washing his face, and at the same time, his comms buzzes.

_ Hey Nureyev. I’m sorry for freaking you out like that. I’m doing okay. Just going to look after myself for the rest of the night. _

_ It was good talking to you. I’m sorry you haven’t been doing well. Let’s talk more soon. _

_ I L Y x _

Nureyev smiles to himself, and texts a quick message back.

_ ILY2, Juno. Forever and always. Xx. _

It doesn’t entirely eliminate his worry. Juno said some things in that call that they haven’t fully discussed as a couple, and it’s left Nureyev with more questions than it has answers in some ways. 

He’s glad that Juno is doing… better, but he still doesn’t know the full extent of how low his low was, and hence how much ‘better’ he is, comparatively.

He didn’t know it had distressed Juno so thoroughly that he can’t say  _ I love you _ . 

Juno has told him, in uncertain terms, about his inability to fully disclose his feelings for Nureyev. And it has been fine, sort of. At least, Nureyev hasn’t tried to let it bother him and he’s  _ mostly  _ succeeded.

Juno had never mentioned it as worrying him this much, though. He wonders how long Juno has spent plagued by some unbidden fear that their relationship is somehow incomplete unless Juno can make himself say those words -- and how he could convince Juno that that isn’t the case.

Nureyev sighs and wanders back to his bedroom. He reads back over his messages with Juno and tries to ignore the steadily growing buzzing feeling as it creeps back into his mind. He wants to reach out again and ask how Juno is, but he also wants to give him his space. He knows he can be a little… fussy at times, even if Juno has talked to him about not minding if he has to soothe Nureyev’s concerns more than once in a conversation. 

Another, smaller concern that is quickly gaining traction in his mind, is how much Vespa could have overheard of their talk. He racks his brain, trying to think of exactly what they’d said. Juno had talked about not enjoying using an alias for Nureyev which — while uncomfortable — is not necessarily a problem, given that everybody already knows Ransom isn’t his real name. But then there was the frankly disturbing show of emotion that Nureyev had blubbered out in the name of communication. He doesn’t mind it being for Juno’s ears, of course, but Vespa doesn’t have to know how utterly pathetic he is. Not only that, but he’s sure it would do nothing to soothe her concerns of his betrayal for him to openly admit he’s concerned about being questioned or interrogated by the remaining members of the crew. 

It’s possible that Juno had the comms volume down low enough that Vespa couldn’t hear, but… it’s not likely. And there’s not much they can do in the name of privacy, holed up together in the room that they’re in.

He may have to confront the reality that a great deal of that soul-pouring was shared with Vespa. The thought had crossed his mind when he’d started talking on the call, but honestly it hadn’t bothered him at the time. His primary concern had been helping Juno no matter who heard.

The things you do for love, Nureyev supposes. 

But now his fear isn’t solely for his sake — it’s for Juno’s. Vespa doesn’t necessarily  _ hate  _ Juno — not like she seems to despise Nureyev — but that doesn’t mean she isn’t prone to making a few jabs in his direction. If she were to react badly to their conversation, make fun of him for crying — or even for not being able to say  _ I love you _ when she throws the same words to Buddy so casually — things could very quickly fall from bad to worse in terms of their getting along. 

He spends a few hours turning these possibilities over in his mind, and it’s only when he catastrophises up to the point of having imagined Juno and Vespa coming to blows over their silly little phone conversation that he decides he really needs to get out of his head.

It’s frankly embarrassing, the lack of control he has over his anxiety these days. Juno has talked to him about having to accept that you’re feeling things before you can move past them, or some such concept, but in Peter’s experience, it has brought him absolutely nothing but pain. Acknowledging his feelings, it turns out, is thoroughly unpleasant. No matter what.

It’s late enough that even Buddy, somewhat of a night owl, should have retired to bed, and so he slips down the hallway towards the kitchen. A cup of tea and a snack to occupy his mouth and hands will help. It also serves the purpose of tricking his primal instincts — as a great thief had taught him a long time ago, the body knows it cannot be in danger if it is eating or drinking. Trick the parasympathetic nervous system -- the part of the brain responsible for slowing down and focusing on things like digestion -- into action, and the rest of the body and mind is soon to follow. 

He walks into the kitchen and is horrified to see Buddy sitting at the bench, a glass of whiskey in front of her. She looks up, and makes eye contact with him, and Peter is rooted into the spot.

“Captain,” he stutters out at last, “I—was on my way to the bathroom. Excuse me.”

“Pete,” Buddy says, “I know you’ve been avoiding me. I haven’t seen you in days. Come and sit down, would you?”

“I think I’d rather—”

“Captain’s orders,” she says. 

Nureyev sets his jaw, and walks over to sit down on a barstool beside her. “What can I do for you, Captain?” 

“You can get yourself a drink if you’d like, for a start. Relax, Peter. You look about as highly strung as an anxious tightrope walker.”

“Thank you for the offer, Captain, but I’ll decline. I’m a terrible lightweight and I’d rather not embarrass myself.”

Buddy looks him up and down and shrugs, “That’s your decision, Pete, though I’d like to think you’re perfectly capable of embarrassing yourself without any substance-related aid.”

“I—” Nureyev frowns, “Thank… you?”

“It wasn’t particularly a compliment, darling.”

“Ah.” 

Nureyev swivels on his barstool and waits for her to say something. A long time passes before he realises that she really isn’t going to say anything at all. He looks at her. 

For lack of better terminology, Buddy Aurinko looks terrible. There are dark rings underneath her organic eye, and he can only guess that were the other side of her face not obscured — and not damaged by radiation — it would not look much better at all. She is nursing her drink in both her hands, a little slumped over it despite the fact that as far as he is aware, the frankly alarming amounts of alcohol she consumes don’t ever seem to bother her.

“Captain, if I may ask,” Nureyev hazards, “Was there a purpose for your inviting me down to sit with you?” 

Buddy shrugs again and tosses her hair over her shoulder. “I had just thought perhaps you might like the company. If your experience of this entire crisis has been anything like mine, darling, I thought you might need it.”

Peter Nureyev is a master of getting the things he wants by making other people believe that those things are, in fact, what  _ they  _ want. By his standards — and by Buddy’s, if her history and exceptional people skills are anything to go by — this is a terribly thinly veiled proposition. 

And he can’t quite help but take it. He reaches out, and pries one of Buddy’s hands away from her glass to twist her fingers with his own.

She lets out a long, shaky sigh, and squeezes his hand. 

For a long time they simply sit there in absolute silence. Buddy finishes her drink, refills, empties the glass, refills again, offers Peter a drink again, empties her glass. 

“I suppose things aren’t going as well as you’d perhaps expected,” Nureyev asks-not-asks. 

Buddy just looks at him, “And you, Pete? I imagine you’re doing just as perfectly well as you told me you were when I tried to offer you my support at the start of this entire endeavour?” 

Nureyev closes his mouth and returns his gaze to the bench. 

A moment later, his mouth opens and words seem to fall out of him quite without his permission. “I’m very worried about both of them,” he says, barely above a whisper. “I’m worried about myself.” 

Buddy squeezes his hand again. “Me too.”

When Buddy finishes the bottle, she pushes it away and leans back in her barstool. Her vertebrae crack noisily as she stretches, and she lets go of Peter’s hand for the first time since he took hers. Peter wipes the sweat on his shirt. 

“I’m going to call her,” Buddy says, and Peter isn’t stupid enough to ask who she means. She slides off of her barstool and then puts both her hands on Peter’s shoulders.

“Thank you, Ransom,” she says.

Then she walks out of the kitchen towards her bedroom. 

The kitchen suddenly feels almost unbearably empty and cold. Nureyev looks at the empty bottle of alcohol on the counter, and decides he might as well put it in the bin to give himself something to do. Then he wanders aimlessly back towards the sleeping quarters. 

He surprises himself when he stops in front of his own room and finds he has no particular desire to return back to his quarters. Instead, he feels compelled to keep walking, past Jet’s quarters, and the empty quarters where Vespa should be right now if she weren’t locked with Juno, and then he stops.

Nureyev knocks on the door, and in a few moments, it swings open. 

“I was beginning to think you would never ever ever ask, Mista Ransom,” Rita says, and grabs his arm to pull him inside. 


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the delay on this chapter!!! <3

Movie night with Juno Steel isn’t…  _ that  _ bad, it turns out.

He whines all the way through the movie, of course, but Vespa finds that his criticisms are actually… engaging. Sort of. And every now and then his wise-cracks are actually kind of funny. 

And she has to admit, it feels fucking amazing to be eating proper food after nearly two weeks. They each get a packet of popcorn and pretzels, and the second the food hits their tongues they both devour it all within minutes.

“Oh my fucking god,” Juno says, with his mouth full to bursting. “I can’t believe I ever took pretzels for granted. This is the best fucking food I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.” 

Yeah, she’s not far behind him on that. 

They find a shitty rom-com about a princess and her forbidden lover which is frankly full of the terrible kind of humour that Vespa can’t get enough of, and the two of them end up in stitches. 

It’s kind of nice, actually. Buddy doesn’t really like these sorts of movies — she watches them, sure, but isn’t a fan of the particular low-bar sense of humour they’re full of. She can’t imagine Peter Ransom’s the kind of guy to go for them either.

She didn’t know she and Steel had this in common. She marks down the good movies for her list to send back to Buddy, and smiles inwardly at the knowledge that Buddy will be horrified by every single one of them. 

They keep the movies playing until late in the night, and Vespa finds that the noise of them helps her brain tune out the normal noises that would plague her with nothing but the quiet room to play around in. Once she sees a guard materialise in the room and reach out to grab the two of them with four ugly hands, but Juno doesn’t react at all, and so she blinks it away and tries to focus on the screen. 

Vespa starts to feel her face getting heavy when they pass the third movie, though. She hasn’t slept a solid night since they arrived here — she’s always either woken up offensively early, had a disrupted sleep, or not slept at all, kept awake by the conviction that if she were to sleep, it would trigger the events that would lead to something terrible happening back aboard the Carte Blanche, or to Juno, or to herself. 

“Starting to get sleepy here, Steel,” she mutters to him, “Let’s make this the last one.”

“Yeah, sure,” Juno says, “Here, hold on—”

He peels back his blankets and gestures for Vespa to get in next to him. She squints at him, “Not a chance in hell, Steel.”

“Not to sleep here,” Juno rolls his eye, “You just might as well get comfortable if you’re going to be staying for the rest of the movie, especially if you’re feeling sleepy.”

“Fine,” Vespa says, and gets under the blankets. There’s barely enough room for the two of them — Juno has to turn basically on his side. He props the comms up and they keep watching.

Vespa watches the picture in front of her eyes start to blur and grow dark. She snaps herself back into focus — if there’s one thing she’s not doing, it’s falling asleep here. 

Juno yawns beside her, “Goddamn. Now that I’m comfy, I’m pretty fuckin' tired too. Movie’s only got ten minutes, though.”

“Cool,” Vespa says. “Ten more minutes.”

She wakes up with Juno’s arm thrown over her waist. Her first instinct is to jump up and make a massive fuss about it, of course, but when she goes to move, she’s suddenly aware of the even ins and out of Juno’s chest behind hers. The comfiness of the mattress and the sheets against her tired, tired body. The pillow under her head. The way she feels, for the first time in two and a half weeks, well-rested.

She’s so relieved she could almost start crying. Instead, she closes her eyes, and enjoys the comfort for about thirty seconds before she goes to peel herself out of Juno’s grip.

“Mmm,” Juno murmurs, and tugs her in closer, “Don’t go, baby.”

Vespa shoots out of bed, “Jesus hell, Steel.”

Juno’s eye snaps open and he screams, windmilling his arms until he falls backwards off the bed in a big tangled lump of sheets. 

“Fucking hell, Vespa,” he says from the floor.

“For the sake of both of us, I’m going to pretend I hallucinated all of that,” Vespa says, and Juno makes a weak sound of agreement from where she can’t see him.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AAA its the second last chapter!!!! its ur second last chance to comment :P
> 
> how are u hoping it will end??? 👀

Nureyev finds himself in Rita’s room almost every single night in the four days that follow his phone call with Juno. Most nights they watch movies together — it turns out that Rita has a list of every single one of Juno’s favourite movies over the last 15 years that they’ve known each other (so I know which ones to put on on our top hits night, Mista Ransom, jeez!) and she is more than willing to let him watch them with her.

Juno had been right. Of course Juno had been right. Rita had no invasive questions to ask him at all. All she cared about was that Nureyev seemed to be alright, and talking to Juno, and, more importantly, that he was willing to substitute in as her very best friend while Juno was away. She had made it painfully clear that he would be losing the rank the second that Juno stepped foot back on the Carte Blanche.

It also turns out that Rita has an incredible bank of stories from Juno over the last twenty years, spanning from wholesome to frightening to embarrassing, and Nureyev is delighted to find a new fact about himself out: he absolutely adores hearing embarrassing stories about Juno. 

“Oh, he’ll never wanna tell you about this,” Rita says, waving a nail polish brush in the air, “one time he spent this entire case convinced that there was a wild dog out to get him. It was the weirdest case we’ve ever been on Mista Ransom, let me tell ya. First of all, who even sets a wild dog on someone as some kinda a threat? It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard of in my whole life, and I’ve watched basically every stream ever invented since the great Stream Revolution of 2600 where all the people got fed up with how terrible all the movies were so they went and cut off all the big producers heads—“

“Did that… really happen?” Peter interrupts, and Rita just gives him a huge wink.

“Anyways, so after that Mista Steel spent a whole week trying to hunt down every single client he’d talked to in the past month who had a dog. When he couldn’t shake confessions out of any of them — and believe me, he tried, he had one poor man crying on the floor by the time he was done with 'em — he set on every person he’d so much as breathed at. I kept trying ta tell him, Mista Steel, don’t you think this is a little much? But he was all like ‘No, Rita, believe me when I say it’s really important that we find out who did this, it could be the HCPD, they’ve always had it out to get me, if I disappear there’s a safe under my desk (he says that a lot, Mista Ransom, honestly it’s kind of par for the course by now) they could be after you next’ so we spent all this time asking all of these people whether they’d heard of this dog threat. Now when all of  _ them  _ turned up empty, that’s when we turned to his friends. Have you ever heard of Mista Mercury, Mista Ransom?”

Nureyev shakes his head, and watches Rita’s eyes bulge out of her skull.

“ _ What?!”  _ Mista Steel’s never told you anything about Mista Mercury? I swear to God, Mista Ransom, Mista Steel doesn’t know what’s a good story to tell if it steals his favourite streams. I will fill you in on Mista Mercury later, but all you gotta know about him is this first and foremost: he’s a real dog lover. Also, he’s a real chronic misspeller on accounta this new alphabet he invented which he thinks will make it way easier to read Solar only the thing is he just kinda expects everybody to  _ know  _ about this new alphabet without ever explaining it. So Mista Steel shows up at Mista Mercury’s apartment and knocks on the door all ready to, like, apprehend him and stuff, and Mista Mercury throws open the door and says ‘JayJay—‘ (he always calls him that, I don’t really know why because in my opinion Mista Steel don’t seem like a Jay at all but they’ve known each other since they was like six years old, Mista Ransom, so I guess they know what’s best for each other) ‘I’m so glad you got my invitation!’

Nureyev blinks. “And?”

“ _ And!?  _ Don’t you get it! This whole time the invitation had meant to say that a dog was out to  _ pet  _ him, and Mista Mercury had this whole dog petting party all set up to make Mista Steel feel better about the stressful week he’d had!”

“Oh my,” Nureyev says, “And so what happened?” 

“Well, Juno hit Mista Mercury a lot which really wasn’t all that nice but I suppose it had to happen.”

“Oh.” 

“Mista Mercury kinda gets hit a lot.”

“Isn’t that…. Well. A little abhorrent?”

“It’s just the way things are, Mista Ransom. You ain’t gotta fight it. It’s all part of the great Martian life cycle.”

“I see…” 

“Anyways, how come you stopped painting my nails! A girl’s gotta do everything by herself around here, I swear…” 

After they paint each other’s nails fully and watch the rest of the movies, Nureyev lets out a big, sharp-toothed yawn. 

“How have you been, Miss Rita?” he asks.

“Huh? Me?” Rita sounds genuinely surprised that she’s asked. It makes him stop and think — when  _ is  _ the last time he can remember any of them checking in with Rita to see how she was? 

“I’m doing just fine Mista Ransom! Even though you painted my nails all black which is really sort of your thing more than my thing, not that I hold it against you whatsoever cause I think it’s really sweet and also would never refuse such a lovely gift!”

“You… asked for black,” Nureyev says, “You specifically picked out the black nail polish and passed it to me.”

“Yes, well, sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”

“What does that— you know? Nevermind. You still haven’t answered my question, dear?”

“Oh, how am I? Pfffffffffffffffffff—” (she goes on like this until Nureyev is pretty sure he can feel her spit against his face) “— fffffff! I’m absolutely fine as usual, I’m Rita!”

“You’re not worried about Juno at all?”

“Why would I be worried about Mista Steel!? What should I be worried about when it comes to Mista Steel?! There’s absolutely nothing wrong at all except for the fact that he’s locked really far away from his best friend in the entire world and there’s absolutely nothing she can do about it and even though she really misses him he hasn’t given her a single call whatsoever except to ask her to give him movies which is totally fine really because giving movies happens to be one of her favourite things of all time to do except for that it sort of does kinda make her feel pretty bad.”

Nureyev goes to open his mouth and say something, and before he can, Rita talks right over her.

“And besides! It’s not like Mista Steel has anything close to a habit of just disappearing without saying absolutely anything at all to his prettiest hacker slash best friend and then making her real, real, worried and ending up having been through an awful time that he didn’t let anybody help him through!”

She seems finally to deflate back into the mattress. Nureyev goes to say something to her to make her feel better, when she breathes in and then out in a big long sigh that gives away the impressive lung capacity that must power the machine that is Rita. 

“Wow. I feel a whole lot better after saying all of that,” she says. “Thanks Mista Ransom. You really are the best. I can see why Mista Steel likes you so much.”

Nureyev says absolutely nothing to that. 


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs: sexual references !

It feels like absolutely forever and no time at all at the same time before the announcement finally comes over PA that today is the last day for healthy patients in quarantine. Each one of them will have the afternoon to organise their things, be checked for weevil mumps at the door, and — as long as they turn up negative — will be released back into the world as healthy citizens.

Juno has to say he cannot fucking wait. 

Sure, the latter half of his stay hasn’t been all that bad, to be honest. He’s been keeping in better contact with Peter and — after a tip off from him — with Rita as well. Vespa has been making calls with Buddy. They’ve been spending more time together (although they have both made it a rule that bed sharing is absolutely, one hundred percent off the table).

That’s not to say that it hasn’t also been a fresh kind of hell every goddamn morning in the place. The couple in the room over seemed to have decided, in the last few days, that this is their last chance to go big or go home, Juno and Vespa have  _ both  _ been kept awake having to listen to the frankly obscene things they shout out about each other’s bodies.

(“Hey, uh, Vespa,” Juno says on one such night, as they both stare up at the ceiling.

“Yeah?” 

_ “Can’t believe how fucking deep you can make it go, baby!” _

“Ransom and I…” Juno tries to find a way to politely phrase his question. “We, uh…”

_ “Yeah, wanna feel you fucking shake me like an earthquake, babe!” _

Juno feels his entire face contort into a grimace despite himself and the rest of the sentence falls out of his mouth, “We never sound like this, right?”

Vespa sighs. What frightens him more than that is the incredibly long amount of time it takes her to respond. 

“No,” she finally admits. “You two are fucking awful. That’s a goddamn fact. But not as bad as this.”

“Oh thank God,” Juno breathes.) 

While Juno has managed to somehow avoid another spiral like the one that left him bed-bound at the start of their journey, Vespa’s paranoia hasn’t been as easy to just disappear away. She still wakes him up in the middle of the night sometimes (Juno learned after the first time to keep his blaster  _ away  _ from his pillow) to ask him about shapes or sounds, and sometimes he has to do sort of weird things to help disprove some of her paranoid thoughts. It’s stressful, and at times really frustrating, especially when it fucks with his sleep, but it’s not that bad all in all. They manage to get through it alive. 

All of this to say that Juno is over the fucking moon that he’ll be able to sleep in his own bed again, that Vespa will be able to have Buddy to look after her in areas where Juno just isn’t equipped… and secretly, most of all, he’s just excited that he gets to see Nureyev again. 

That’s the main thought that’s circling around his mind when the guard in the hazmat suit comes to lead them out of their quarantine quarters down to the testing centre. People are only being let out in groups of three or four quarantine bays per round, and it’s taken fucking forever for them to get to the front of the line. 

“Hey, Vespa,” Juno says as they pause just before the check. “Look, I know this has been hell in a lot of ways, but uh. It’s also been… nice. I’ve enjoyed getting to know you a little better.”

“Don’t let it go to your head,” Vespa says to him, and Juno only has half a second to feel offended before she pulls him into a hug.

“You’re alright, Steel,” she says, and then the quarantine staff yell at them both for getting within 30 centimetres of each other.

He watches Vespa go through the testing process first, and it occurs to him that if either of them test positive for this terrible disease then it’ll be back in the quarantine bunk for fuck knows how long. He watches the lady in charge tie the tourniquet to Vespa’s arm and finds himself crossing every part of himself that he can cross. 

The lady presses a needle into Vespa’s vein and starts to take her blood. Juno almost hurls when a tube of the stuff flows out, but he’s too filled with anticipation to look away. The lady takes the needle out of Vespa’s arm and deals with the wound. Then she shakes it.

There’s a long moment of tense silence while they wait for the needle to complete its analysis. Then it pops up, and the doctor nods her head, “Negative. Please go to the baggage disinfecting area.”

“Thank hell,” Vespa mutters, and slips out of the chair. “Good luck, Steel,” she says, and then picks up her duffel bag of stuff and is gone.

Juno hops into the chair. For a lady with a pretty extensive history of needles, he’s feeling pretty squeamish about this one, so he shuts his eyes the second the lady asks him which is his dominant hand and keeps them screwed shut until long after she’s taken the needle out of his vein.

He opens his eyes just long enough to see the words pop up on the screen of the needle. NEGATIVE.

“Off you go,” the lady says, and Juno is so relieved he could almost kiss this woman.

He takes his stuff over to the disinfecting station, which is sort of like one of those scanning things at a spaceport you have to put your bag through to check it for illicit materials (drugs, weapons, pineapples, the like) except for that he has to keep his bag open and it sprays the entire thing with mist.

He hopes that the copy of  _ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy  _ that he stuffed in there for Nureyev doesn’t get too damaged by it. Nureyev’s a nerd about this sort of thing, and it feels good being able to bring him a souvenir from his time in this terrible fucking place. 

Vespa and Juno reconvene right at the end doors of the screening bay for quarantine. Two guards, still in full hazmat suits, which honestly feels just a little offensive at this point, each hold on to a handle on one of the doors.

“Thank you for complying with Solar pandemic control laws,” they say, and the doors open to reveal…

“Oof!”

The first thing Juno sees is a blur of movement, and then something hits him square on the chest, and it takes him a full half a moment to fully recognise that the things wrapping around him are limbs and he breathes in and gets a deep breath of a cologne that smells like a million far off planets.

But not that far off, not anymore. Juno pushes Nureyev back just enough to find the collar of his shirt and pull him down into a long, long kiss. 

“Fuck, I missed you,” Juno mutters into Nureyev’s mouth, and Nureyev just nods, tangling his fingers into Juno’s hair. His breathing is all strange, and as Juno pushes him away he realises something.

“Oh my god, are you crying?” 

“You have no proof,” Nureyev says, and pushes him far enough back that he can wipe the tears away from his face before they start to smudge his mascara. “Oh, love,” he sighs, “Oh, I missed you. I missed you so much.”

“Hey, hey, hey, shhhhh, shhh,” Juno pulls him back into his arms again, “It’s alright. I’ve got you.” 

He angles his face so that he can have his mouth right by Nureyev’s ear, and then he holds Nureyev tight and tells him, “I’ve got you, Peter Nureyev. I’ve got you.” 

Nureyev squeezes him tightly in his arms, and sighs into his ear. Finally he releases him, and Juno steps away to see the others all looking at them both.

“Oh, fuck off,” he says. “Like you’re not being just as goddamn sappy, Vespa.”

Vespa is still half clinging to Buddy. She just shrugs, and pulls Buddy into a long kiss where everybody can see them.

“Huh,” Juno says. “I guess I was right.”

They all head back to the Carte Blanche together. Buddy and Vespa never leave each other’s sides, and they disappear into their room almost immediately after everyone arrives back on board. Juno sits next to Nureyev on the ride home, holding his hand tight and leaning on his shoulder, but after they arrive he leaves Nureyev to go and watch movies with Rita.

It’s nice to spend time with Rita again. He gets to make up for some of his having ditched her earlier on in the week, which feels good. He lets her cuddle right up to his side and they watch some of the movies in the pack she sent him that hadn’t had the chance to — even though she insists they’re the best ones and he really had been absolutely missing out.

After their movie night, Juno slips back into his dark cabin, unsure whether Nureyev will still be awake. He’s glad to find out that he is when a pair of warm arms curl around him and press him against the wall.

“Fucking finally I get to get you alone,” Juno murmurs, as Nureyev’s lips run along his jaw.

Nureyev kisses him once on the mouth, and then peels back away from the wall, dragging him back to the bed where they tumble onto it together.

The next morning is their first back together as a family again, finally. The whole ship seems to feel warmer than Juno has ever remembered it being. It feels like home.  He’s not sure if a place has ever really felt like that to him before.

There are things he should talk about with Nureyev. And… and Rita, who he’s still learning not to take for granted. And Vespa, who he’s just begun to be able to be a better friend to. He wants to make sure that Buddy and Vespa are alright, and as comforted by being returned to each other as he and Nureyev are. 

There are all these things and more, but when Juno wakes up he starts his day the way he’s been dreaming of for weeks: he kisses Peter Nureyev in the warmth of early-morning blankets for as long as Nureyev will let him. 

Which is pretty long.

When the two of them make it into the kitchen, Rita bounds up to him. She’s already planned their next few nights together, apparently, and he lets her rattle off the details to him while he makes his coffee.

Just after he places his coffee down on the bench, a large shadow looms over him. That’s all the warning he gets before strong arms wrap around his middle and effortlessly pick him off the ground.

“Woah, Big Guy!” Juno laughs as Jet squeezes him, just bordering on too tight.

“It is good to have you back,” Jet says, and lowers Juno back down onto the ground again. “I was worried about you.”

“Geez, yeah, I can see that,” Juno wheezes slightly, “You planning on giving the same treatment to Vespa?”

“No,” Jet says plainly.

Juno can’t help himself but smile. The old Juno Steel would’ve hated a surprise hug like that, but that had felt… nice. Warm. He hadn’t known how much he loves this little rag tag family until he’d been apart from them. He never realised how much he appreciates them all. Now that he thinks about it, after an experience like this, he’s not sure if he can even imagine any of them going back to bickering over little things. Not even him and Vespa.

“Where is Vespa, anyways?” Juno says, and at the same time, Vespa’s short frame appears in the doorway.

She marches right up to him and pokes him right in the chest, “I take it back.” 

Juno blinks, “Huh?”

Vespa’s glare is murderous, “The couple in the spaceport? I’d take them a hundred times before hearing what I heard last night.”

_Well_ , Juno thinks, as he starts to bristle with embarrassment. _Maybe one last squabbling match won’t hurt._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL IT HAS BEEN A RIDE! 
> 
> i hope that you all enjoyed this silly little fic and here's hoping that to everyone still in quarantine that your experience ends as wholesome as this one did!!!!
> 
> thanks for all your comments and support, ill be sure to go back and reply to as many as i can over the next few days!! xoxoxo
> 
> and keep an eye out for my next fic, a 50k hanahaki au !!! it is SO MUCH more painful than this fic and i cant wait to wreak havoc on you all <3 amen


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